GimpLabels script-fu (Shallow Thoughts)

GimpLabels script-fu

Someone showed up on #gimp the other day asking about how to make business cards. He was on Windows, so gLabels wasn't really an option, and of course my old gimp-print patch to read gLabels label templates would have been no help to a Windows user.

I got to thinking about how easy it would be to write a little gimp script analogous to my CD label script, which created a rectangular template in which to design a label, then created a bigger image scaled to the size of a page on which the label could be repeatedly positioned, with specified start and end points.

I couldn't resist trying it. It wasn't quite as easy as I had initially thought, mainly because I don't know script-fu very well and debugging script-fu is painful. But it still only took a few hours on a couple successive days to hack up something that more or less works: GimpLabels.

I didn't try to parse the gLabels XML from script-fu; I wrote a separate python script to translate the label templates into script-fu.

It's not perfect. On a page of 30 Avery 5160 labels (10 rows), it gets a little off by the bottom of the page. I don't know yet if this is a problem in the gLabels template, in my understanding of the parameters, or in the script-fu. It's fine for shorter pages.

I integrated my existing CD label routines into the script, but haven't yet written code to parse the CD label templates and make a print page from them. I've lost motivation for working on CD labels anyway, since discovering a few months ago how drastically they hurt CD longevity.

Anyway, GimpLabels was a fun hack, and an example of how easy it is to do this sort of thing in gimp.

Tags: gimp
[ 12:20 Feb 02, 2005    More gimp | permalink to this entry | ]