On the side of the angels(?!):
ofnuts wrote:
1) duplicate the text layer and bucket-fill.
What if, instead of bucket-filling with a solid color, you wish to highlight the text in another manner? By applying a filter or rendering to the background layer, for example.
ofnuts wrote:
But in the general case, the original layer, which is just the text bounding box according to font metrics, is not the best reference for a frame/background (isn't it a bit a tight fit on the sides?).
It is a repeatable reference based upon the graphical data, and thus amenable to my non-artistic sensibilities. Also, the original layer can be duplicated, auto-cropped, the bounds selected, and the duplicate deleted. This leaves a selection that bounds just the text (works for non-text too), awaiting further processing (growing, rounding, distorting, etc). And while this may seem like a tedious way to obtain such a selection, each of the steps can be assigned to dynamic keyboard shortcuts and the process executed by pressing in sequence the keys (1, 2, 3, 4, as an example).
ofnuts wrote:
2) IMHO a rather artificial case... if Wilber is nicely framed in the layer, then the layer has been cropped around it, and this could have been used to also produce the frame.
Such is not the case if the layer happens to have been
imported from a file or otherwise generated as its own entity.