[Gimp-user] GIMP won't handle simple copy-and-paste?

[Keith Purtell <kpurtell imirus com>]

I've been using GIMP about six months and thought I was passably good at it. Today it has me stumped. My project is to enlarge one page in a PDF to 200% then copy the top, middle and bottom thirds into separate PNG files. (Copied w/screen capture tool.) Then assemble them in GIMP to create one 72dpi bitmap file that is twice as wide/tall as the original PDF. Simple.

But ... after creating a working xcf file in GIMP with the lower third then expanding the canvas size up to create space for the other two images ... I open and copy the middle screen capture, then paste into my xcf. Then I have the middle as a new layer, and need to trim off part of the bottom of that layer. I draw a rectangle around the part of the new floating layer that needs to be removed. The moment I've done that, everything else on the layer that is not inside the selection rectangle disappears. 

So I start over and select the area I want to keep instead of the area I want deleted. This seems to work until I try to move the newly-cropped section, at which time deleted sections appear and disappear depending on which direction I try to drag this new, cropped layer. This is maddening and counter-intuitive. I'm wasting an enormous amount of time just trying to piece together three screen captures. A 10-minute job in Photoshop (which I have at home but not here at work).

   

Keith Purtell