[clue] [advice]

[Michael J. Hammel]

On Thu, 2011-04-07 at 10:16 -0600, David L. Willson wrote:
> gimp can select in a variety of ways, and can cut, copy, and paste
> selections, and can process selections in a wide, wide variety of
> ways, including rotation.

Depends a little on how much you want to play with it.  GIMP 2.6
(current stable) can rotate rendered letters but its much harder to work
with individual vector versions of those letters.  Rotating rendered
letters will, with multiple transformations, reduce the quality of the
rendering.

GIMP 2.6 has a "Text Circle" plugin that can render text along a
circular path, but you can't play much with the shape of the circle or
the letter positioning along that path.

GIMP 2.7 (development version, planned 2011-10-23 release of 2.8) does a
little better with vector text though its still not particularly easy to
do transformations on individual letters.  It has a built-in Text along
a Path feature that allows you to specify an arbitrary vector path along
with creating text that is also generated as vector paths.  This allows
you to resize and transform the text in a manner that is a bit easier
and more flexible than GIMP 2.6.  But it is still a little
less-than-easy to work with.

Better still, for doing text along paths and transformations, is
Inkspace.  It's a fully vector tool designed for this type of layout
work.  I don't use it much, however. 

Can't say which is easier to use.  GIMP has lots of printed books.
Inkscape doesn't have many, if any at all.  Neither will get you a
point-click-rotate solution.  You're gonna have to work at it a little.

-- 
Michael J. Hammel                         Principal Software Engineer
Mike.Hammel at coloradoengineeringinc.com    http://coloradoengineeringinc.com