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GraphicsMuse: Mastering Gimp – Part IV

[ Thanks to Michael J. Hammel for this
link. ]

“This is the final article in a 4 part series. Initially written
as a proposal for a talk to be given at ALS, it turned out to be
too long for an hour long talk. Since I think its still a useful
paper, I’m presenting it here on the ‘Muse….”

Even the best tools have their limitations. The Gimp is a
raster graphics tool, not a vector tool. What that means in
layman’s terms is that it doesn’t deal with line drawings very
well.
There are a couple of options available to make line
drawing tasks a little easier from within the Gimp, and a few
others for dealing with the topic outside of the Gimp.”

“Although you can draw some fairly primitive shapes (ovals,
rectangles, even polygons) using nothing more than a decent
selection, a brush with 0 spacing and the Edit->Stroke Image
Window menu option, a better tool for the job within the Gimp is
the GFig plug-in. This tool is vector based, allowing you to
specify primitive shapes using control points at vertices, centers
and radii. These control points can be edited and deleted. You can
even specify the brushes to use when rendering to a new layer. GFig
is a fairly decent tool for drawing, but it’s interface is a bit
clunky and many users may find it hard to use. It also doesn’t
really scale well for use with print sized images.”


Complete Story

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