Freehand Draw - Released

The freehand draw feature described a few days ago is now available. I'll be posting a video tutorial for it shortly.The opacity allows a highlighter effect when merged "over" the image or .

You can use the merge "under" control with a transparent image like a dingbat to produce important works such as the one below:

Some innovative enhancements for this tool are in the works and can hopefully added later

Freehand Draw - Preview site

An upcoming release of Font Image Generator will provide a freehand draw tool that can be used to draw or annotate onto images that you generate.

Here is a link to the preview site

To use the feature, generate an image and then click the draw button and draw with mouse or graphics tablet if you have one.

To merge the drawing with the original image, click the "create" button. If you want to apply the drawing under the original image click the "over/under" button just right of the create button to toggle the target of the merge.

It uses a Flash overlay which generates a .SVG vector image which is then composed into the underlying image by ImageMagick.

Release is delayed by a bug in ImageMagick which should be fixed in the next ImageMagick release due soon.

The bug is that ImageMagick fails to recognize unfilled paths and always fills them with black. You will see this on any curved line that you draw. This makes the feature pretty useless in FIG. It works well with straight lines, stipples, etc., however.

In 2009, expect a full suite of vector graphics tools that can be used with FIG generated images.

Please give the alpha site a try and post your comments and observations.

New FIG text Engine, Stroke Settings, Image Dims.

All FIG images are now created with ImageMagick giving new features and more robust performance, especially with larger font sizes. Previously, text generation was done by PHP/GD.

The new features include stroke color/width and the ability to set an image width independent of the height. Word-wrap also behaves much better with this change. Stroke settings are found on the control panel. To achieve transparent fill with strokeoutline, clear the hex value from the fill color box.

Now, setting the image width by itself controls the point where text wraps to the next line. Image height expands automatically to contain the text that was entered.

Setting both width and height does the same thing except that any text that overflows the dimensions you set will be clipped.

Arc Distortion Effect

A interesting new effect is available in the IM editor effect library. Arc distortion lets you bend text or any image into an arc.



Command: -rotate 0 -virtual-pixel Background - background \#ffffff -distort Arc '120 0'

The background color in the command is the color IM uses to fill the empty space created when the effect is applied. 120 is the number of degrees in the ARC. Set it to 360 and text is bent into a full circle.




Command: -rotate 0 -virtual-pixel Transparent -distort Arc '120 0'

Starts with a transparent image. In this case, the empty space is filled with transparent pixels



Command: -rotate 180 -virtual-pixel Transparent -distort Arc '120 180'

To reverse the arc apply some rotation applied:

Pattern Filled Text

This effect is found in the ImageMagick Library. Fills the current font/size/text with the current foreground image adding a border of the current foreground color.

How to use:

• Build a text image on the foreground. A Fat solid font works best.
  
• Set the foreground color to the desired border color.
  
• Expose the effect in the ImageMagick library.
  
• Build a foreground image you want to use as fill. Anything can be used. Try some tiles from the "tiles" category in the clipart section of the dimgmapper.
  
• Apply the effect
  

Example:

Glitter, Edge Effects.

Added some new effects in the ImageMagick library.

- Glitter fill: Fill a GIF image with blue glitter. In the next few weeks, this feature will be expanded with additional fills and better interface. Consider this just a preview.

- Torn Edge, Soft Edge, Vignette: Some edge effects. Note that currently, some of these require a PNG format image. You can convert to PNG with the function on the effects toolbar. Converting back to JPG will kill some of the effect because transparency is lost.

I'll try to improve these effects in the future.