Hi Gary -

IMHO, there are two options to achieve this with less pain:

1) Enable "snap to canvas edges" on the view menu. If needed, fiddle with the snap distance in edit->preferences->Tool options.

2) Script it. it would not be a complicated script-fu or python-fu script, and it would allow precise positioning as an optional thing.

3) Use the align tool. Hey wait---didn't I mention "2 painless methods". Indeed, still IMHO, GIMP's align tool is arcane enough I can't consider its use painless. It _should_ enable you to do what you want - just don't ask me how. :-)

js -> wrote:

Hi folks,

Either I am blind or incompetent, maybe both... a hint would be much appreciated:

I wanted to set up a template for dealing with printing four images on a sheet.

I created an image the size of the sheet and then added four layers, each of the desired image size which needed to be positioned appropriately.

When I went to position the images, I could not find any reasonable way with the move command or with any of the layer operations to position each layer precisely. By that I mean simply type in the coordinates of the upper left corner, or move with the mouse where I see a text version of the upper left coordinate of the new layer position as I move.

If trying to position using the mouse, the lower left of the status line shows the position of the pointer itself, so that is useless in positioning the layer as a whole; and the numbers to the right of the per-cent size display show how much the layer has moved relative to its starting position, not the absolute position of the upper left corner. (I'll grant that the latter is useful, but in this case one needs something else, particularly if a layer has been moved and needs to be repositioned to a fixed location.)

The only way I could get what I wanted was to expand to 800%, and at that magnification I could grab the upper left corner with the mouse so the mouse position was itself the upper left corner position. Surely there's a better way?

Layer/Layer to Boundary Size... does not appear to work as advertised. The offset appears to be relative to the original size of the layer, not the original size of the image. The panner image is limited to the size of the layer, not the image. When you first bring up the dialog, you are unable to reposition the layer unless you change the layer size to make the layer smaller. If you make the layer half the size of its original size and then click "Center", the offset is set to - 1/2 the size of the original image, not + 1/2, which seems bizarre. The layer is scaled properly, and ends up where you would expect (based on the center command given, but not based on the offsets indicated), but the values in the Offset boxes seem to have the wrong sign. It works by moving the original layer relative to the desired new layer, rather than position the new layer size relative to the image. Which means you can't move the layer relative to the image if the layer is smaller than the image, and the graphic panner doesn't show you the layer position relative to the image as a whole. It is not at all intuitive and is not useful for quite a few common cases.

Layer/Transform/Offset shifts the contents, but not the layer itself. Which is what it is supposed to do, so that's ok; it's just not usable for this operation.

Thanks for any clues,

Gary _______________________________________________ gimp-user-list mailing list
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On 2 January 2014 22:42, Joao S. O. Bueno wrote:

3) Use the align tool.
Hey wait---didn't I mention "2 painless methods". Indeed, still IMHO, GIMP's align tool is arcane enough I can't consider its use painless. It _should_ enable you to do what you want - just don't ask me how. :-)

Ok- that was unfair of me -
it is actually easy to do this with the align tool once one grasps one or two concepts of its operation. Took me less than 2 minutes. a) select the align tool on the toolbox. b) click on one of your layers
c) Verify that alginement is related to "image" in the tool options d) click on the left arrow and on the up arrow, in the upper halff of the tool options dialog to have it positioned at the upper left corner of the canvas
e) repeat b - d 3 more times for the other layers, replacing the arrow buttons as desired

js
-> wrote:

Hi folks,

Either I am blind or incompetent, maybe both... a hint would be much appreciated:

I wanted to set up a template for dealing with printing four images on a sheet.

I created an image the size of the sheet and then added four layers, each of the desired image size which needed to be positioned appropriately.

When I went to position the images, I could not find any reasonable way with the move command or with any of the layer operations to position each layer precisely. By that I mean simply type in the coordinates of the upper left corner, or move with the mouse where I see a text version of the upper left coordinate of the new layer position as I move.

If trying to position using the mouse, the lower left of the status line shows the position of the pointer itself, so that is useless in positioning the layer as a whole; and the numbers to the right of the per-cent size display show how much the layer has moved relative to its starting position, not the absolute position of the upper left corner. (I'll grant that the latter is useful, but in this case one needs something else, particularly if a layer has been moved and needs to be repositioned to a fixed location.)

The only way I could get what I wanted was to expand to 800%, and at that magnification I could grab the upper left corner with the mouse so the mouse position was itself the upper left corner position. Surely there's a better way?

Layer/Layer to Boundary Size... does not appear to work as advertised. The offset appears to be relative to the original size of the layer, not the original size of the image. The panner image is limited to the size of the layer, not the image. When you first bring up the dialog, you are unable to reposition the layer unless you change the layer size to make the layer smaller. If you make the layer half the size of its original size and then click "Center", the offset is set to - 1/2 the size of the original image, not + 1/2, which seems bizarre. The layer is scaled properly, and ends up where you would expect (based on the center command given, but not based on the offsets indicated), but the values in the Offset boxes seem to have the wrong sign. It works by moving the original layer relative to the desired new layer, rather than position the new layer size relative to the image. Which means you can't move the layer relative to the image if the layer is smaller than the image, and the graphic panner doesn't show you the layer position relative to the image as a whole. It is not at all intuitive and is not useful for quite a few common cases.

Layer/Transform/Offset shifts the contents, but not the layer itself. Which is what it is supposed to do, so that's ok; it's just not usable for this operation.

Thanks for any clues,

Gary _______________________________________________ gimp-user-list mailing list
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On 01/02/2014 06:38 PM, Gary Aitken wrote:

Hi folks,

Either I am blind or incompetent, maybe both... a hint would be much appreciated:

I wanted to set up a template for dealing with printing four images on a sheet.

I created an image the size of the sheet and then added four layers, each of the desired image size which needed to be positioned appropriately.

When I went to position the images, I could not find any reasonable way with the move command or with any of the layer operations to position each layer precisely. By that I mean simply type in the coordinates of the upper left corner, or move with the mouse where I see a text version of the upper left coordinate of the new layer position as I move.

I strongly suspect that there's a "better way" to do this, but I have done similar things by using guide lines. This makes dragging layers into position a snap - quite literally, the edge of the layer snap to the guidelines.

Doing control-a followed by Image > Guides > Selection to guides, will make the edges of the image canvas "sticky".

Doing Image > Guides > New guide by percent, twice with appropriate values selected in the dialog, will put horizontal and vertical guides across the center of the image.

That's not exactly responsive to your problem - click and drag is still required - but until a better answer comes along it might help.

:o)

Steve

On Thu, Jan 2, 2014, at 08:46 PM, Gary Aitken wrote:

On 01/02/14 17:48, Joao S. O. Bueno wrote: This would be great, but...
I must be missing something; running 2.8.10 on fbsd. When I click on the alignment buttons, nothing happens, and they don't change
appearance on mouse-down or mouse-up. I can't quite tell from the glyphs, but they look like they may be greyed out; at
least they are overall a lot lighter than most of the toolbox glyphs; they look about
like the bucket-fill tool. The "Offset" text box is active and allows changes,
and the reset options does its thing. No error messages that I can see.

Any ideas what would cause them to be inactive? All other tools seem to work.

Sounds to me like you haven't selected the object yet.

Select the alignment tool or shortcut "q" Activate the layer you want to align. (Make sure this layer is cropped smaller than the image size) You should have a hand cursor to select the object on the canvas. when you do you should see 4 small squares outlining how big the object is that you want to align.
Now select the alignment buttons in the toolbox.

I hope this is all it is and this works for you.

akovia

-- 
http://www.fastmail.fm - The professional email service

On Thu, 2014-01-02 at 16:38 -0700, Gary Aitken wrote:

Hi folks,

Either I am blind or incompetent, maybe both... a hint would be much appreciated:

I wanted to set up a template for dealing with printing four images on a sheet.

This may or may not be useful to you but note that you could do this through the print driver if you used e.g. scribus or open office to make a multi-page document and then printed with multiple pages on each physical page. There's also a program "psnup" to do what's called in the printing industry "imposition", positioning multiple pages on a single sheet of paper for printing.

Liam

Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml

On Thu, 2 Jan 2014 22:42:47 -0200 "Joao S. O. Bueno" wrote:

1) Enable "snap to canvas edges" on the view menu. If needed, fiddle with the snap distance in edit->preferences->Tool options.

Is there a way to make this on by default?

On Fri, Jan 3, 2014, at 07:18 AM, tom wrote:

On Thu, 2 Jan 2014 22:42:47 -0200 "Joao S. O. Bueno" wrote:

1) Enable "snap to canvas edges" on the view menu. If needed, fiddle with the snap distance in edit->preferences->Tool options.

Is there a way to make this on by default?

_______________________________________________ gimp-user-list mailing list
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I've never found an option for this, but it would be nice to have one. Probably wouldn't be that hard to make it default though, especially if you compile it yourself by editing the code. I've set a shortcut for it on my machine. Probably the easiest solution for now.

akovia

-- 
http://www.fastmail.fm - The way an email service should be

Indeed, I just now saw there are no options for setting the defaults for the various
"snap to" options. I always assumed they where along the "display (guides, selection, layer borders)" configurations.

js -> wrote:

On Fri, Jan 3, 2014, at 07:18 AM, tom wrote:

On Thu, 2 Jan 2014 22:42:47 -0200 "Joao S. O. Bueno" wrote:

1) Enable "snap to canvas edges" on the view menu. If needed, fiddle with the snap distance in edit->preferences->Tool options.

Is there a way to make this on by default?

_______________________________________________ gimp-user-list mailing list
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I've never found an option for this, but it would be nice to have one. Probably wouldn't be that hard to make it default though, especially if you compile it yourself by editing the code. I've set a shortcut for it on my machine. Probably the easiest solution for now.
--
akovia

--
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