drawing shapes in gimp?

[Matt Price]

On Wed, 2009-06-24 at 13:15 -0400, Christopher Browne wrote:
> 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.
> 
it really helped a lot when Chris sent that next message out w/ the
comments.  Thanks for that Chris!  I honestly had never thought thatt
learning postscript would be worth my time, but now I'm very much
intrigued.  


> 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.
> 

yes, i noticed that as i was fooling about.  

> 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.

i'd forgotten about inkscape, which i've never really used.  and it
looks like it is by far the best tool for what i was trying to do, much
better than Openoffice, aswell.  

anywy, thanks to both of you for the great suggestions.  

matt


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-- 
Matt Price
matt.price-H217xnMUJC0sA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org
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