Help with a project asap. Simple question

[Brando]

Hey all.

I'm quite new to Paint.net, and this sort of thing in general, only having downloaded it yesterday. I am currently trying to do a project for university and am struggling with one thing. I have used a photo for a backdrop for a planning poster I have to make. Example below:

I can create boxes where I would like to put text but I don't know how to create a text box which will fit inside the transperant box I have created. Whenever I try to copy my text in it just appears as one long line across the page.

Sorry if this is a stupid question but I did a search and came up with nothing. Any help would be greatly appreciated as I have to finish it by Monday.

Regards,

Marlon

[Bob]

create a text box which will fit inside the transperant box

You can't.

Try to play with line breaks or use the Text tool multiple times.

[Brando]

Any other way that could possibly be easier? There is a lot of text going in.

How about with a different program? I don't have photoshop but I'm sure I could get it

[Alex G]

Photoshop cost MUCH money......... But you can try a program called

"GIMP"

[Crazy Man Dan]

Yeah, PDN doesn't auto line-break text to fit inside a bounding box. However, The GIMP doesn't do this either. The GIMP has a little window that pops up, kinda like Notepad, just a simple window with a text box in it. You use this text box to edit the text, and it changes on screen.

So, with PDN, you edit the text right on the image and have to break the text manually. In The GIMP, you look at the image and break the text in the box where needed. The advantage of The GIMP, however, is that if you need to change the text, you can edit it after the fact. If you use PDN for it, just make sure you have your text the proper size and wording before you commit the text.

Another free option would be Artweaver, but it has the same behavior as the above two - no bounding box for you!

If you need a bounding box, though, check out Inkscape. It's a vector prrogram, but it can import and export raster images. So, get the background the way you need it, then save it as a .png or something (.png is lossless, so that's the option I'd choose). Then import the bitmap into Inkscape, switch to the text tool, and draw a bounding box within one of the white areas of your background. Then when you go to export (File -> Export Bitmap), make sure the "Drawing" button is selected at the top (second one in from the left).

If you do go with Inkscape, be patient when drawing the bounding box. You click and drag to set the size, then when you release, it'll think for a bit, then let you edit the text. I'm not sure why it takes it so long to process the size of the text box, but it's done that for as long as I've used the program, so I'm used to it...

You can read more about Inkscape here:

http://www.inkscape.org/

I hope that helps!

Dan Larson

[BuzzKill]

Unless the text you are copying already has correct line breaks in place to fit in your text boxes, you're gonna have to redo the line breaks. :idea:

It should only take you a whole five minutes to do. :wink:

[Brando]

Thanks people

[42nt1]

You could try opening a new Word document, setting the margins so that you can only type within the size of your bounded boxes. Then type all your text, or copy it from your other word document, or set the columns on your existing word document, etc. After you have all your text formatted the way you want, I recommend not adding font and size elements, just lines, go in the Left edge of your second line, and put a hard return at the start of every line. Then open notepad, copy the text out of your word document into note pad, select all again, then copy and paste into PDN.

Once you have your text added to PDN, go ahead and change font/size/color/style, and move the text into the appropriate position.

In web design you would accomplish much easier by just creating a div tag and styling the div tag to the width you want it to be using CSS.

[Kathy]

When you start typing, the words will centre align, left align or right align from the original position of the flashing cursor depending on your choice of alignment from the tool bar. To have the text go onto a new line hit the enter key.

After having the text look the way you would like you can move it by placing the mouse over the little arrows flashing at the bottom right of your text. There are no text boxes as far as I can see in this program, so after you have put the text where you want it you can drag a rectangle shape around it by clicking on the shape under the paint bucket and dragging a rectangle around your text. Unfortunately, you cannot change the position of this box nor any longer fine tune the position of your text.

So, Brando, I have one word for you "Layers, layers and Layers!"

I tend to put just about anything I do on layers. Add a new layer for each element you want to add and you can then fine tune each elements position by dragging the layers around. To move a layer, make sure it is selected in the layers box, Select all (Ctrl + A) to select the whole layer and using the Move selected Pixels(M) you can drag the layer around by placing the cursor over the handles or nubs around the selection and dragging.

Another great thing about layers is that you can so easily add an effect to just one layer or get rid of it altogether and make a new one without having to change everything.

I hope that this has helped. I have much to learn yet in this program and cannot wait for someone to start a beginners tutorial.

[Born2killx]

That's quite a big picture you got there...

[Illnab1024]

Also, when doing something like this, Paint.NET can't justify (because there are no boundaries), so it would be best to use a monospace font.