On Sun, Oct 03, 2004 at 10:10:56AM -0500, David McClamrock wrote:

In GIMP 1.2 (or even 1.0, with which I started), it was easy to produce a beveled text effect: just insert text, leave it selected, and apply a starburst (spherical), foreground-to-background gradient. Only the text itself was selected, not the box around it.

In GIMP 2.0 (on Mandrakelinux 10.0, from RPM package gimp2_0-2.0.0-2mdk), I'm not finding it obvious how to do the same thing. The selection includes not only the text itself but the surrounding box, and the gradient likewise covers the entire box, which I don't want. Also, the yellow line around the box doesn't readily vanish when I want it to; in GIMP 1.2, selected text could be deselected like any other selection.

Are there some settings I can change to make GIMP 2.0 (otherwise a definite improvement over 1.2) work more like GIMP 1.2 in these respects? Sorry if this question has been asked before, and thanks in advance for any answers!

via the text tool options in gimp create your text as a path and then using the path dialog, Path to Selection and your text is selected.

also, you can use the fuzzy select to select the alpha of the layer and Select -->Invert this.

and as usual, you can use the text as a layer mask and control your gradient this way.

carol

Hi,

David McClamrock writes:

In GIMP 1.2 (or even 1.0, with which I started), it was easy to produce a beveled text effect: just insert text, leave it selected, and apply a starburst (spherical), foreground-to-background gradient. Only the text itself was selected, not the box around it.

GIMP 1.2 used to create text as a floating selection. A lot of users found this very inconvenient since they prefer text to reside on a dedicated layer. The GIMP 2.0 text tool creates a text layer. This has the advantage that the text stays editable (unless you apply an effect to it) and that you don't need to deal with floating selections which are considered annoying to work with.

In GIMP 2.0 (on Mandrakelinux 10.0, from RPM package gimp2_0-2.0.0-2mdk), I'm not finding it obvious how to do the same thing. The selection includes not only the text itself but the surrounding box, and the gradient likewise covers the entire box, which I don't want.

You can call Alpha to Selection to create a selection from the text.

Are there some settings I can change to make GIMP 2.0 (otherwise a definite improvement over 1.2) work more like GIMP 1.2 in these respects?

No, you can't. We could consider to add an option to have the text tool create a floating selection but I am not yet convinced that this would be useful enough to warrant the coding effort and the extra check button in the text tool options.

Sven