Thread: A gimp text question

Hi there. What you want is the PATH tool. You draw a path that follows the route your text to eventually take, as curvy as you like (make sure to start at the start and end at the end, not the other way around). Once your path is drawn, you can click on 'text to path' or something like that, and write your text and ajust the size and font to work.

I will also add in that the text tools in Gimp used to be a bit odd. Not sure about the 2.8 version but they were always hard to work with.

I honestly found it easier to create a flattenned image in GIMP and save it as a .png or .jpg, open it in Inkscape (another free product). Create a new layer in Inkscape and then create all the fancy textification you could ever want. Inkscape does a lot more for text than what's in Gimp. Then when you have what you need, export or just save that text only layer. Go back into gimp to your project and use the "Open as layer" option to bring in the text. So long as you keep same image size through the process it will be perfect.

Somewhere a long time ago I had this conversation when RobA helped to me to get this down. I'll have to check for a tutorial but I'm not sure if that exists.

In 2.8 Gimp improved the text tool a little, but it is still unintuitive and unwieldy to use. Nevertheless, the text to path is relatively simple and works well. In this case its probably easier to do it in GIMP, however if you plan on doing a huge amount of text work in your images then GIMP is not the right programme for you.

Gotta love this site.

Not only did I find a pertinent thread to my problem, but Jaxilon answered my question with his own, indirect response (I was looking for something better then GIMP for the text part, and I recalled others mentioning a program but couldn't think of the name). It looks like I'll be fiddling around with Inkscape now. Going from PS to GIMP was rough, but loosing PS's ease-of-use text tools was a nightmare.

On the bright side, GIMP forced me learn how to use the path tool.

Thanks Jaxilon