GIMP Version: 2.8.10
Operating System: Linux
GIMP Experience: Intermediate Level

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I was going to make a pdf of the Paint with a Gradient tutorial for Gimp 2.8 and I am not having very good luck. Here is a path to the tutorial.
viewtopic.php?p=2281#p2281

First, the Foggy Circle brush does not work well, I had to enlarge it to 17 to get it to work at all.

Second, the paint is not confined to the selection. I zoomed in to 400% and you can see the color slopping between the selections.


Third, the colors don't flow. I had practically all red in the squares. Moving the brush in different directions helped some.

This may or may not be a silly question, but is the layer mode set to RGB?

Yep. I think you meant Image Mode when you said Layer mode, Wallace.

Yeah, image mode.
I've experienced this too. I haven't found a cause for this, but I usually have to work around this manually however I can. It seems to happen more often with small selections of a few pixels or so.

You need to disable Anti-aliasing in the Text Tool Options dialog when performing Step 2 of your tutorial.

Only if one tries to paint with a gradient while the image mode is other than RGB. I've also notice when trying to fill very small selection that sometime it ventures outside the given selection. This could have something to do with anti aliasing being enabled.

OK, this has taken me some time to put together:

@ k1te: I used alpha to selection on the text, shrank it 2 pixels.

@ saulgoode: How would turning off antialiasing in the text tool change the shrunk selection using the paintbrush on it? I did not turn it off in either version.

I no longer have gimp2.6, but have 2.8.6 on one hard drive and 2.8.14 on the other so I tried it with those two versions; Incremental was checked in v2.8.6; I accidentally cut it off. Here are my results:

Short answer: Try it!

Your problem occurs before you shrink the selection. It occurs before you perform Alpha to Selection. The problem arises because the text is being scaled before it is drawn on the layer. Since you don't have antialiasing unchecked, the pixels of the scaled text do not align exactly with the pixel locations of your layer and fractional components of the text coordinates get interpolated. (For example, while a fully opaque pixel in the scaled text may be located at x=1.5, with antialiasing it would get drawn as a 50% opacity pixel at location x=1.0)

In the following screenshot, the upper text was drawn without anti-aliasing; the lower text with it. As you can see the anti-aliasing results in pixels around the edges being various shades of gray. These pixels end up becoming partially selected when you perform Alpha to Selection, and will become partially drawn on when you paint with your brush.

Yes, you can sure see the difference, cool

OK, I tried it and it worked. Interestingly, in v2.8.6 I didn't need to change the aliasing, it worked fine without going over the selection boundaries.

Painting the selection in 2.8.14 with a gradient is just not as nice as it was in .6 or (I believe) in 2.4x that the original tutorial was written with.

This tutorial is definitely not suitable for 2.8.14. The only difference in it and .6 is that I am using Fedora 20 in 64 bit as opposed to Fedora 17 in 32 bit which may or may not make the difference.