Re: Clearing up a floor plan

["%20Bunny" <lists@xxxxxxx>]

I too use GIMP at work along with colleagues to clean up very poor
quality plans that we got in documentation passed from another company,
as well as setting them on a mapbase, and adding labels we generate in
another app and paste in.

Graham Reeds wrote:
> I have a rough scan of a floor plan. The floorplan was very bitty (dirt, 
> text, etc.) and while it is currently a BMP it obviously was a JPG 
> (artifacts around text gives it away).
>
> I've cleaned it up as best I can, taken a select contiguous region of 
> the walls and cut that into a new image.  However the walls are 
> generally straight but the thickness and color varies.
>
> So I decide that the easiest way would be to "trace" the outline in 
> another layer. However I can't see a way of drawing perfectly straight 
> lines. There's the path tool, but I can't use the help or figure out how 
> to use it. (The help refuses to install saying it can't find an install 
> of gimp though gimp itself runs fine.)
>
>   

You could use path tool then edit > stroke path to apply raster line.

But I just use hard edge pixels tool (N)  holding down shift to get
straight lines. I trace at 100% view and trace curves with serious of
straight lines.

I only need path tool for when need line style such as dot dash. And I
have not really got to gripes with the path tool, one need to click
slowly without moving of quickly for straight lines. I really should get
to grips with them as could be more useful.  See:

http://www.gimptalk.com/forum/topic/Creating-And-Using-Paths-602-1.html

I trace on separate layers so can save without original version. Layers
in GIMP have been really helpful over what we were using before Scan2cad
which could only do 50-50 blend on combining  and overlaying images.

Also one tip is to switch measurement in corner to mm  then knowing
actual measurements and scale (eg at 1:500 2mm on paper 1m for real) can
draw lines that fit or visa versa. It is pity can set mm to be a default.

More tips:

check out options in box below with each tool as one selects it.

With layers combining:
scale down or crop before rotating;
rotate before scaling up,
as rotate very slow on big images.
It is more efficient to use measuring tool before doing rotates and
scaling to work out angles and ratios to get new layer to lock onto
base, rather than trial and error, if scales and orientation are not
know before.


Remember as go along to save as xcf  file to preserve layers before end
merging which I do by saving as png, so I can then go back to layer
version if need to make changes.

> *rant* Now I could just draw over the lines using MS-Paint (and probably 
> will) but I thought Gimp would save me time. Everytime I come to use 
> Gimp it infuriates by doing everything slightly awkwardly - rotate the 
> image by 90 degress and you lose the edges because the canvas doesn't 
> rotate with it so you have to back up, resize the canvas and then 
> perform the rotation and resize the canvas down resulting in lost time. 
>   
maybe you were rotating layer (under layers menu) and not the image
(under image menu). That caught me out at first.

> Now I am a big fan of OSS and try to use it as much as possible but at 
> times it seems easier to just use a commercial package - which if so you 
> have to question whether the package is doing what it is supposed to.*rant*
>
>
>   
I agree that GIMP is not that intuitive and a bit clunky when compared
to commercial packages such as Xara Extreme which has good raster
handling functionality as well as vector.

http://www.xara.com/products/xtreme/


Tutorials http://gimp.org/tutorials/ are good first port of call before
the docs.


One thing also it is a pity one can't set in preferences to point GIMP
to ghostscript lib to do PDF import, as we use PDF Creator (
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/ ) to separately generate
pngs from PDFs of our mapbases,  that our GIS mapping web app system
produces. Our computer are locked down with us only have user access,
and need to put in long winded 'eProcurement' requests to our IT support
people to get anything installed or reset up, so was not practical to
get PDF import up set up on odd guides I have seen online when we got it
installed.

Is PDF import built in on next version of GIMP, or does one still have
to have it access ghostscript with manual tinkering?

regards,

Micah



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