Gradients With The Gimp

A gradient is a slow change from one colour to another, so gradual as to blend the colour change so that it is seamless.

We are going to make a small image that graduates from white to blue and which will be used as a background image in a webpage.

To follow along, open the Gimp, select new and set the size to 200 pixels wide by 400 pixels high.

Now look at the toolbox and choose the 'Blend' tool just over halfway through the tool list.

Look down at the tool properties that open below the toolbox and find the find the box with a tooltip of 'Gradient'. It's the box that displays an image of a black to white colour transition.

Click that box to display the contents and inspect the other gradients that the Gimp has already prepared for you to use.

Although not the colours we need, we can select, say, the 'Deep Sea' gradient. Leave the other controls in the box as they are and drag the cursor anywhere across the new image in a straight line left to right to produce a graduated fill using just those colours.

If you have the default options, you will create a linear - that is one side to another - gradient that begins with the colour on the left of the sample swatch and ends with the final colour.

Undo this using 'Control' + 'Z' and then try dragging down the image from top to bottom to produce a graduation in that direction. Reversing the direction in either plane will allow you to create a graduation that reverses the colours.

Making our own
This is all very well but, despite the Gimp having a good selection of graduations, the colours that I want to use are not there so I must make my own graduation.

The first four gradients that are shown in the drop-down gradient selector are a little special. Although they will be coloured black to white by default they actually represent the foreground and background colours that are selected in the Gimp.

(The reason they are back and white is because this is the default foreground and background selection. If you are doing this and you have already changed the colours then your first four gradients will look a little different.)

To create my gradient I simply select white for the foreground colour and blue for the background and now I can use one of the gradients to make my image.

The first two create gradients that use HSV colours and use the colour circle to make them. If you are not sure what this means just try them and see if you like them.

I want the next two. The one headed FG to BG(RGB). This one uses the normal RGB colour model and simply graduates the foreground colour into the background one.

Choosing this one and dragging across the image produces a nice graduation from white on the left to blue on the right.

However, I am not satisfied. The intensity of the blue and the quickness of the graduation is a little too harsh for my liking. I want a less dramatic graduation.

I can easily archive this by dragging the cursor across the image and continuing on across the blank canvas on the right side of the image. Obviously the more intense colour that is laid down on the right hand side will not show as it is not part of the image but I will finish up with a nice graduation that is not too harsh. Try it and see, and also refer to the image above.

OK, I have created my image but if I had swapped my colours to make blue the foreground colour and white the background and then used the fourth option headed 'FG to transparent' it would have created a fill that went from blue on the left to transparent on the right.

There is much more to using gradients and it is well worth experimenting both with the supplied gradients and making your own to see the range of gradients that it is possible to create.

Creating A Basic Business Letter In OpenOffice

We have covered the basics of OpenOffice Writer which, for most people, will be information they already know, either from working with OpenOffice or another word processor.

It's a little dry to just go through the various menus and controls that make OpenOffice work so it makes sense to get some experience using OpenOffice by creating projects that will showcase the various features of the suite.

Letter writing
Letters are not written as much these days as once they were since we rely on computers, phones and other means of communication to get things done. Unfortunately, this often shows when letters do have to be written and it is a useful skill to be able to set out a business and also a less formal letter.

Letters that look nicely set out create an immediate impression of being professional and, if this is the case, forceful and not to be ignored. To put it simply, well set out letters ensure that you are taken seriously.

Also, if you have occasion to write on behalf of your employers or if you want to write a letter of complaint, then a well presented letter will go a long way to impress and make your work seem more professional.

The mechanics
To do this properly there will need to be sample letters that can be downloaded so I have to set up a mechanism whereby this can happen so we will have more about this in the next post.

Since this subject doesn't lend itself well to creating illustrations, there will be no pictures at the head of each of these posts.

RSSOwl Labelling The Feeds

I'm just taking a moment out of the normal run of posts to deal with the allocation of labels for news.

Recall that in a pervious post it was necessary to specify Dessert and not desserts as the category? The assigned categories in any feed system will probably not be as good as you would like so it is always better to allocate your own names for news which are, in RSSOwl, called labels. It is then possible to choose to search labels rather than searching the category and this will usually be more successful.

Labels in the bigger scheme of things
Making sense of information is all about being able to find, sort and replace the information that we have. In order to do that we need a way to quickly and easily manipulate large amounts of data.

As was stated earlier, if you have just a few feeds then you can look through them to find what you want. But feeds are everywhere and the more you have the richer will be your experience but the harder and more time consuming it is to sort through them each time you want something.

Labels are a way to cut down this work and enable you to perform operations, like news searching, quickly and easily. The downside is that they require a little time to put in place.

However, as you will see, time spent at the beginning is more than amply repaid at the end.

Creating labels
Open RSSOwl and in the left hand pane choose a folder and then a feed. Now, in the right hand pane find a news item and right-click the item. From the menu that is produced choose 'Label' and then Assign labels to create a new one.

The news item will then be marked with the label and that label name will appear at the end of the menu when you choose another news item to label.

If you want to mark a whole feed of news, simply highlight all the news items in the feed and do the same. Now all items will carry that label.

To check what label a news item is tagged with, scroll down the bottom of the item in the lower right-hand pane. The label is shown just above the categories and comments.

In use
Labels are annoying to have to stop and do but it is true to say that labelling will make or break the effectiveness of your search.

The best advice is to spend a little time thinking about the names you will have as labels. Remembering the Dessert and desserts problem above, the last thing you want is to find that you miss items because of labels that are too similar.

You can, incidentally, have more than one label and the best way to make use of this is to label all items in a feed with a general name and then name specific items with one or more extra labels to identify them.

A Brush With The Gimp

We continue looking at using the Gimp for drawing and painting by taking an easy route to the brushes dialog and a look at the more unusual ones.

Creating pictures in the Gimp is easy but what often confuses people is the number of brushes that are available - what are they are for and how do you use them?

Brushes
Open the Gimp and create a new image at a convenient size - maybe 800 by 600 - with either a white or coloured background.

Now choose the paintbrush tool from the toolbox on the left and you are ready to go.

In the brush dialog on the right (or get it from 'Windows', 'Dockable Dialogs' and then 'Brushes') there are a range of brushes for you to use.

Having fun with brushes
The best idea is to just choose a brush and start painting. Once you see what the brush will do, change the size (it's called scale in the dialog under the left hand toolbox) and the Opacity just above to see what it does.

The round brushes gives a hard line while the fuzzy brushes create a less well defined one. As for the other, more unusual brushes, you will have to try them for yourself. Note, some of them can be given a colour and some cannot. The image above was created using just the more unusual standard brushes.

The range is there to demonstrate what sort of brushes you can get, rather than present you with a series of workable brushes but understand this. You can use the brushes that you have been given or you can create a special brush yourself to the specification you want for a particular part of a picture. You can even use images as brushes almost in the way you use rubber stamps!

However, this is somewhat advanced and we will look at it later. Creating brushes is not hard and getting them ready-made from the internet is even easier and we will look at that later.

In the meantime just enjoy doodling and having fun while you get used to the range you have and while you get to understand what they do and how they can be changed in size and opacity.

OpenOffice Writing Aids Options And The Thesaurus

As mentioned in the last OpenOffice post, we will look at the options menu found in the Writing Aids dialog this week and also cover the use of the thesaurus.

The Writing Aids allows you to manage dictionaries but also have an additional set of options that are worth looking at. Open the dialog by going to 'Tools', then 'Options', 'Language Settings' and finally 'Writing Aids'. The options are found in the bottom pane of the window.

The most often used box is the one that controls the way OpenOffice checks spelling. Many people do not like inline spellchekers that check as you type and produce a wiggly red lines under suspect words. To stop OpenOffice checking spelling as you type, uncheck this box.

There is no grammar checker as standard although one is available as an extension.

Look though the remaining controls which tell OpenOffice what to do with uppercase words and special formatting cases. The figures after the text refer to the number of characters for each option. These defaults are usually well chosen and the boxes probably will not need reviewing unless you have specific writing requirements.

Thesaurus
The purpose of the thesaurus is to find words that are similar to the selected word. Generally, it is used to find a replacement for a word has been used too many times or used shortly before in the paragraph.

You can find the thesaurus from the 'Tools', 'Language' and then select 'Thesaurus'. However, remembering that the shortcut key for a spellcheck is 'F7', it is easy to look up a word using the thesaurus shortcut of 'control + F7'.

Load some text into OpenOffice Writer and then position the cursor inside a word and select one of the methods above to bring up the thesaurus dialog.

You will see that the word you selected is in the box at the top left while the meaning is below. On the right, at the bottom, are a list of similar words while the top right box has the word you selected pre-loaded.

Choose the word you want to use as a replacement from the list on the right hand side and it will appear ready in the upper box. Pressing 'OK' will substitute that word for the selected word.

The 'Search' button allows you to highlight a word in the list on the right and search the thesaurus for that word while the 'Language' button lets you select the language to use.

The thesaurus is very easy to use and well worth getting to
know since it can make your writing more interesting and also save a lot of head scratching!