14 Aug 2003 (updated 14 Aug 2003 at 06:26 UTC)
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Red Letter Day.
For a short time today I actually had my scanner, photo printer, laser printer and Wacom tablet all working at the same time. Eight years of wishing seems to have finially paid off. Wow.
Of course I tempted fate by bragging and soon after the gimp finally gave up and stopped recognizing that I was using the tablet when over the toolbox area which makes it a real pain to change tools, colors, brushes etc. Oh well, it was magical while it lasted.
While things were working I "inked" the sketch of Ettore . It was fun using the gimp again but fairly depressing to see that functionaly it is still pretty much the same as it has been since 2000. The UI is greatly improved but there is still no autosave, adjustment layers or line art helpers. Obviously I'm biased toward certain features but any one of those would have made me happy.
One of the things I keep coming across when trying to color the line art is that the fill tool is a constant source of frustration. The bordering effects you get when trying to fill solid areas require far to much manual cleanup. As a workaround I added an old hack back into my tree that simply grows the fill selection by two pixels before it colors it, but that is obviously less than ideal in the long run. Passing a grow radius to the fill function would be nice but it already has something like 13 arguments and I just didn't have the heart to do it.
I'm sure someone has come up with a good algorithm for bucket filling line art that avoids the fringing but a quick search on google didn't turn up anything. If I can come up with some more time I may try to do a more exhaustive search.