<victor meldrew voice>I can't believe it. I CAN'T BELIEVE IT!</victor meldrew voice>

(apologies for those of you who haven't got a clue who "Victor Meldrew" is, this might give you a very vague idea - though you have to have seen it to appreciate it properly!)

Anyway. What I can't believe is how bloody complicated it is to produce a basic banner image so I can use it as a heading for the website I'm trying to build.

Now it's fair to say that while I believe, pretty much, in the FOSS "ethos", sometimes I feel that it's driving me back to proprietary stuff.

The gimp (either version i.e. 1 or 2) for example. The banner I want to create is just text. The only odd thing being, that I want the letters to be in different sizes/fonts/case etc. In otherwords, I want it to be very "hap-hazard" in appearance (because just doing that with either html/xhtml font changes, or trying to do it with CSS, would be exceptionally complex - not forgetting that some people might not have the font's that I want to use).

And this part of my frustration isn't exclusive to the gimp, it seem's to apply to lot's of the FOSS out there. The frustration is "USABILITY".

Some of the FOSS app's that are available, are true masters of programming. Though it would appear that not only do developers not know how to write in a straight forward manner in help guides and howto's, but they seem to use the "scatter gun" approach to usability.

To make thing's worse, when I look around to see what's available helpwise, both as google hits or actual hard copy book's, the google hit's appear to be random/hit"n"miss/irrelevant and if I then check amazon, the extortionate price of any available book's is enough to make me want to say "f**k it, I'll just go and through £200 at a student/teacher licence of studio MX 2004" (cos there seem's to be lot's of help/assistance/suggestions for that! and it'd certainly save me having to learn how to do website building thing's manually).

I'd understand, if maybe the gimp was some small, rather obscure application, but it isn't is it. It's had some brilliant "media" exposure, and due to it's being ported to windows as well, should have lot's of info to "get going", but that certainly doesn't seem to be the case.

I mean, what do "they" expect people to do? Have the same level's of programming knowledge as "them" or just hope that it look's interesting enough, to make people want to spend week after week trying "to get their head round it".

I'd apologise if I thought I was being overly critical, but I honestly don't believe that. I mean, let's face it, because so many "things internet" have been "stolen" by commerce, can't those who produce such excellent/clever/able app's as the gimp, at least make them "fun" to use (rather than making them such "hard work", that you feel like you're as stressed as a man on national stress day, carrying a bag full of stressed things )????

</rantmoanbitch>

regards

John

p.s. maybe someone know's of a link that explain's the gimp, or maybe the overall principle's of graphic image producing, or even just an easier way of learning?

i can see where your coming from :S
but i can't really comment cause i have to get out of here for work ...
but anyways here is a link with a bazillion other links :
http://www.linuxartist.org/gimp.php

and i mean, i am sure you've seen it cause its right on the homepage
http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/
but there are many things there also ..

and then a user manual ..
http://www.kuhcampus.de/~roman/gimp-.../en/index.html

again you may have seen this stuff time and time again, but yet
what else would you need ? is there something specific that your
doing that is not shown in these tutors, docs, etc ?

Thanks for the reply DrOzz.

I'll go and check out the link's (off the top of my head, I don't recall if they are among the one's I've already checked out).

I was also going to add (continuing the gimp example), I can't even get "tool tip's" if I hover my cursor over something. There also seem's to be no obvious way of formatting the text so I can then save it as an image (either gif, jpg or png). Weird!

regards

John

and just for info, the third link is that one that's been most successful in explaining what I've been trying to do.

Thanks very much.

regards

John

no prob d00d, hopefully your further along then before now

A little. Though not as far as I'd hoped. But like British Rail, I'll get there eventually.

It's a shame that someone doesn't do a league table of usability/understandability or both app's and help/howto's/instructions/guides.

regards

John