Re: [Gimp-user] Extreme newby needs some help please!

[Liam R E Quin <liam holoweb net>]

On Sun, 2012-08-12 at 17:04 -0700, Jessica Tomlinson wrote:
> Hi all,
>      I'm really pleased to discover such a complete, free application
> which grew out of a community spirit.  However, I'm a little
> frustrated because I'm having a bit of trouble figuring out just what
> makes it tick ;0.

I'd suggest getting hold of "gimp for artists" or for a more traditional
aproach :-) Akkana Peck's book on gimp.

For your immediate question... inkscape is easier than gimp for making a
font, but, to use gimp...

put each image in a separate file. You'll then open an image, go to the
Layers dialogue (control-l, or it starts out life docked next to the
image if you didn't move it already), right-click on the "background"
layer and choose 'add alpha channel' - this lets the image include
transparency.

Use the eraser and/or paintbrush to clean up the image; if you scanned
it, look under the colours menu for Levels and press the Auto button,
and for Curves and drag the ends of the diagonal line horizontally
towards the middle, making a steeper line, to increase contrast.

next, go to the layer menu and, under transparency, choose Colour to
Alpha. You can probably just click OK to get the white in the image to
be transparent.

Finally, go to the File menu and use Export As to export as PNG (this
will give better results than GIF in most cases).

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