Am Freitag, 18. April 2008 00:54:15 schrieb Joel C. Salomon:

I'm trying to do some lettering on a half-circle, and it occurred to me that I should be able to do a mock-up on the computer.?To that end, I'm trying to take a scan of my caligraphy, and warp it into the proper shape—sort of like Word 'Art'.?But how can I achieve this twisting with a scanned image?

I would scan the image at a very high DPI, then convert it into SVG (either with pstoedit, autotrace or by loading into Gimp, doing a selection and save the path-converted selection). The SVG I would then load into a vector drawing program like Inkscape and twist it there. Then back to Gimp.

That would probably have better results than warping the scan itself as it wouldn't change the appearance of the letters themselves as warping would.

If you don't do the lettering with hand-drawn calligraphy, you can use Gimp's text tool and write along a path in the image (I think that's covered in the manual or one of the tutorials). Last not least, you can use the vectorized calligraphy also to create a calligraphic font of your own to be used in that way (that would be the most elegant, yet also most labour-intensive method, I think).

Torsten

On Thu, 17 Apr 2008 18:54:15 -0400 "Joel C. Salomon" wrote:

I'm trying to do some lettering on a half-circle, and it occurred to me that I should be able to do a mock-up on the computer.?To that end, I'm trying to take a scan of my caligraphy, and warp it into the proper shape—sort of like Word 'Art'.?But how can I achieve this twisting with a scanned image?

See for the effect I want, and
for the text I want
to bend.

Hi,

I suggest you use Inkscape for this type of distortion/effect, simply convert your text to a path and manipulate endlessly

Owen