05-09-2020, 12:13 AM
(05-08-2020, 10:26 PM)Ofnuts Wrote: ofn-paths-to-selection does it for paths. But what you have is a jumble of strokes. Hence my suggestion to see if OTAP works well enough with your font since you can make it produce one path per character.
One solution (the solution?) to your problem is to have oriented strokes, where for instance clockwise strokes select the inside and counter-clockwise strokes select the outside (so the two strokes of an "O" would be opposite for instance). Then the final selection is the union of all the selections from CW strokes intersected with the union of all the selections from the CCW strokes. But this requires strokes to be closed, have no loops; and makes hand-made paths harder to use because you now need to be able to control the direction of a stroke.
I see what you mean now with OTAP but I could just adjust the kerning in the text dialog to achieve the same thing so the letters are not touching before using text to path, unless I am missing something. Directional strokes are certainly more than I want to tackle for a normal project.
I usually run into this while recreating a logo. Most logos are not just straight text and they will squish, skew, tweak, or otherwise manipulate the text in one way or another. So once I identify the font or something close, I will size and adjust the kerning to match it as close as possible before turning it into a path for further manipulation. So it's at this point where is would be nice to merge/union the resulting path for filling and stroking if needed.
I don't understand how inkscape is able to union a collection of strokes properly. It can take the same path that looks garbled in gimp and make it render properly. Unfortunately when you copy it back to gimp it acts as if it was put in a clipboard blender.
I guess I'm wondering why gimp can't do a union on the actual path/strokes. Is it fundamentally not possible with the way paths were developed in gimp from the get-go?