drawing shapes in gimp?

[Christopher Browne]

On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 12:47 AM, Matt Price <matt.price-H217xnMUJC0sA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 2009-06-23 at 15:31 -0400, Chris F.A. Johnson wrote:
> > On Tue, 23 Jun 2009, Matt Price wrote:
> >
> > > hey there,
> > >
> > > I need to draw a simple picture, a five-pointed star on a monocolor
> > > background.  What would be the best way for me to this in gimp or some
> > > other program?
> >
> > $ cat star.ps
> > %!PS-Adobe-2.0 EPSF-2.0
> > %%BoundingBox: 0 0 70 70
> > .7 .2 .2 setrgbcolor
> > 20 0 moveto
> > 5 { 50 50 rlineto 144 rotate } repeat fill
> > $ convert -trim star.ps star.png
>
> ah.  very nice.  so now you're telling me that to draw, i need to learn
> postscript?  that was NOT what i wanted to hear...  still very cool.
> having trouble understnading what's going on, though.  suppose i want
> the picture 5 times as big?  i guess i can scale it in gimp -- though
> now i try it out, that doesn't seem trivial to do.  and if i want to
> generate the initial picture with one point going straight up?  these
> pics are just slightly off to the side, i guess about 10 degrees.
> again, i can rotate in gimp...  but it'd be nice if the script just did
> it perfectly, wouldn't it.  any chance you could explain what you're
> doing here a bit more fully?

Well, I think there's a lot to be said for the notion of using
appropriate tools, and the contrasts available here are pretty
stark...

1.  The above Postcript file does the task in a file 125 bytes long,
and it's not SO inscrutable that I'd expect it to completely scare off
someone capable of installing and using Linux.

2.  GIMP is a ~60MB application that wouldn't be notably easier to use
for the purpose, because it's not notably good at vector graphics.

3.  On the other hand, to process that Postscript file, you quite
likely need Ghostscript, which isn't *that* much smaller than GIMP
;-).

4.  I suspect you might rather use Inkscape.  It only chews 10MB of
space to install it ;-).  And it has a "create star" icon that allows
you to create, spin, and locate a star pretty easily in interactive
fashion.
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