GIMP Credit: http://gimp.org

Posters use them, films and presentations are hard to imagine without them: text effects. Attract attention with Karsten Günther and GIMP.

OUR EXPERT Karsten Günther loves to extend his GIMP installations with additional components. New scripts and plug-ins often bring surprising possibilities and effects, such as the use of fonts...

A common requirement is to apply effects to try to lift plain text and make it look more appealing. Originally, logos (GIMP’s jargon for scripts that create text with special effects) were the preferred way to make text eye-catching. However, these scripts are limited and can only be adapted slightly. They usually implement just one effect, which is then applied to freely selectable text. Almost all effects try to generate three-dimensional structures from fonts and often combine this with the simulation of special surfaces, such as metal, stone, wood or rust.

Logo Toolbox

For a long time, logo scripts were developed in rows without any restrictions. Only one effect was ever created and the scripts didn’t offer a preview. Logos can be found in GIMP under File > Create. Another disadvantage of logo scripts is that new GIMP versions often have (small) changes in the ScriptFu API, which leads to errors in the logo scripts. It usually takes a few months until adapted versions of the logos are made available. The current version can be found at: https:// github.com/GNOME/gimp-data-extras. However, many of the logos developed many years ago are now considered old-fashioned in terms of design, which is why they’re no longer necessarily available in the GIMP packages of distros and have to be installed separately.

GIMP’s standard logos are worth seeing – often over the top and not very flexible. With some distros, they are provided via the GIMP Extras package and no longer installed automatically.

The Logo Toolbox enables you to create a variety of logos. The dialog consists of several parts: text input and font selection, surface design, text distortion and background.

An attempt to extend the small range of variation of logo scripts led to the Logo Toolbox. This script is a reasonably universal logo generator that provides many more settings than ordinary logo scripts. This has two immediate consequences: firstly, the dialog seems more complicated; secondly, the script itself runs far more quickly and the dialog keeps the last settings used – which parameter has which effect.

As a result, the Toolbox Script always generates a new image with relatively lots of layers. This makes it possible to quickly make further changes. For example, the background can be exchanged or removed at any time, and the drop shadow, surface and depth of the logo can be manipulated afterwards. However, some of the disadvantages of classic logos remain with the Toolbox. For example, the Logo Toolbox allows multiline input text, but the text editor of GIMP cannot be used. Formatting and font changes are not possible in the input text, unless Alpha On Logo is used…