Version 1.6 of 'ofn-text-along-path' released

After writing the sequel to my Text along a circular path tutorial, i had a little conversation with ofnuts and he gave me a few tips how to improve it.

While experimenting with the plug-in, i noticed that its still a bit hard to line up lowercase text on a circle, like this:

Its especially odd it had been overlooked all this time, because it seems to be one the most basic textconfigurations you could think of. But i must admit i used the effect mostly with uppercase letters.

This inspired ofnuts to add two additional Height References, so from now on we can line up text by the middle and the top of lowercase letters.

He told me what made this update a bit tricky is the fact that not all lowercase letters line up with the baseline of the text. Especially rounded letters like o, c or s are often designed with a bit of "overhang" to make them visually more pleasing with other letters.

In the example below, the letters i and n represent the baseline, while all the other letters have a slight overhang.

Here is how it was solved:

• to compute the top of lower/uppercase letters, it checks the max height of X/x, but decreases it by the value to which that letter extends below the baseline
• it defines the midde-of-lower/uppercase to be the average between the two extreme values, without regard for the baseline.

You can download the new version here:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/gimp-path-tools/files/scripts/

As usual, for windows users, put the 'ofn-text-along-path.py' file in your Gimp user folder.

For Gimp 2.8 thats:

C:\Users\Username\.gimp-2.8\plug-ins

and for Gimp 2.10:

C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\GIMP\2.10\plug-ins