The purpose of this group of options was to help focus attention on an area of the text along the path; it was not really intended for use with single words or short phrases but rules are meant to be broken.

There is also a zipped Resources folder to accompany this guide which includes:

Immortal_Taped_letters_only custom font file
bowed path path file



Unpack the resources folder and save it to your preferred location. The path files should be imported to the images (I used a new image size of 1000x800) you create for this project.

Fire up the Gimp and add a bowed path to your image either by using the path tool or by importing the relevant path file from the path tool dock.

Call up the FontSlab dialog:

Filters>>Custom Font Tools>>FontSlab v0.12

Choose the custom font that you intend using and set the ‘Use custom font’ option to ‘Yes’.

Enter your text.

Set ‘Use text modifiers to ‘Yes’ and enter values for the initial, target and final text sizes. The values I used for my path and custom font were 35, 100 and 35.

You may need to alter the length of the path (and/or the modifier values) if your own text does not fit your path.

Optionally, set ‘Rotate letters’ to ‘Yes’.

The viewer is drawn to the focus, or target, which now lies over the middle two words of the text.

It would probably be better if we moved the viewer’s focus nearer to the word Gimp.

The position of the target needs to be moved towards the end of the path. Change the values of the initial size, the target size and the final size and the ‘Target for change’ values until you are happy with the outcome. The values that I used were initial size 35, target size 100, and final size 70 and 86 for the ‘Target for change’.

The word ‘Gimp’ is now much more prominent on the line of text in my example below.




For interest’s sake here is an example where the ‘Target for change’ is positioned closer to the beginning of the path.



The ‘Change size with spaces’ can also be used with the size modifier options.

And of course ‘Jitter amount’ can also be employed to add a sense of fun!