Re: [Gimp-user] Gimp 2.8.2, wheezy install

[Joel Rees <joel rees gmail com>]

On Fri, Jul 22, 2016 at 9:03 PM, Gene Heskett <gheskett shentel net> wrote:
> On Friday 22 July 2016 05:32:40 Joel Rees wrote:
>
> [...]
>
> I tried all sorts of left and right clicks on the various icons in that
> teeny little window, and could not bring up a font selection requester.
> I get the impression it may not be finding its "default" font.

I think that, trying to live between MSWindows and *nix and developers
and converts from the commercial tools, they've lost their way a
little in the defaults and UI design.

> > So I stretched out the text editing layer and clicked inside it and
> > started typing, and I got a default sans font/typeface at 18 px,
>
> Thats smallish for what I want to do.  I could type into the text window
> of this interface, got a usable typeface, at about 18 px, but as I said,
> the only thing that shows up on the image area is that draggable
> outline.

That outline, if I'm reading your mind correctly, is the boundaries to
the new text layer you implicitly added when you clicked on the image
with the text tool selected. Very context sensitive UI.

Instead of simply clicking, you can drag, to give the layer the
initial boundary you want to give it.

> And the first uppercase character typed brings up some sort of
> a multiselector requester that looks as if its a users language for a
> lengthy list of what I take are foreign languages to me, but this list
> does not contain any names that suggest common American English, so I
> didn't select any of them and the requester goes away when the second
> character has been typed in the way too small text entry line of the
> text popup.

I'm not getting that. Oh, wait. Yes I am. You click in the font
selection field and start typing the name of the font you want, and
that's where it starts giving you suggestions that match what you
typed. And the list does not show the names of foreign fonts very
well. It does try, but doesn't quite make it.

Trying to read the developers' minds, they may be trying to avoid the
CPU killer option of trying to list every installed font. I've done
that on machines without enough memory and gotten a panic.

> What is this text editing layer you refer to? I cannot find that in any
> of the pulldown menu's.

If you have the layer tool widget or whatever they call it out, you
can see the layers in your current edit session. It will be in that
list of layers.

It's just another layer, but with defaults and properties intended to
make it easier to type in text and modify it later. It remains as a
separate layer until you do something to combine it with a graphics
layer or something like that.

> > And I can type within that layer, once I start typing.
> >
> > Any clues in that for you?
>
> Possibly. I'll select one of those strange names and see what happens. I
> use Hack as my goto font, and selected Hack Bold, color set to bright
> green. Clicked in the drawing outline on the image, and typed a
> character. The font displayed instantly changes to sans at about 1
> pixel, and my bright green color selection is replaced by black. And I
> see a teeny tiny orange dot where I clicked. So small I cannot reselect
> it to do a back space. So, type what I want, swipe select it with the
> mouse and change it to Hack Bold & bright green, .300 inches high. Text
> expands to that height, but remains black. But there are pix in this
> series I need to "caption" for my web page where the subject is black
> and I must use a different, brighter color for it. Being locked to black
> just won't do, and I never was locked to sans, microscopic and black
> before. You can see the first pix edited at
>
> <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene/mill-stuff/DSCN0614.JPG>
>
> Shows what I can do ATM, but I need to colorize it too.
> I agree, this is the crazyiest cobble job of recoding the text entry I've
> ever dealt with, broken in so many ways it ceases to be just different.
> Its busted Jim. ;-)

User interfaces are hard to get right and easy to mess up. (I know
from experience building a few. :-( )

For the last little while, you've had to type (roughly) the text you
want to paint in into the text layer at the defaults and then select
it and set the attributes you want (as you talk about above).

Anyway, for now, it will help to think in terms of them trying to
leave text layers in a state such that text is not rendered into a
graphics layer until you've had a chance to play with the font, size,
style, colors, etc.

They've made it possible to do that, but it isn't intuitive yet, by any means.

-- 
Joel Rees

I'm imagining I'm a novelist:
http://joel-rees-economics.blogspot.com/2016/06/econ101-novel-toc.html