Feather edges of images?

[myrkat]

I love Xara and used it extensively; however, I am 95% off of windows (currently on Mint 17 KDE) and I Virtual Machine (Oracle) into a Win 7 VM just to use Xara.  One of my favorite tools is the edge-feathering tool.  Basically, one would select an image (or anything, really) and via a slider feather into the background (alpha the edges).  REALLY handy.

I "sort of" have a script in Gimp to do this, but it's clunky and way easier to just do it in Xara, export the feathered item to a bitmap and insert it into Scribus (I'm on linux, btw) - I'd love to see this in Scribus, is it a complicated thing to implement?  Who do I bribe?

[utnik]

hi myrkat

i think this is not really easy to implement (and as it can be done with an image processor not a main function for scribus) – but i could be wrong.
you might file a feature request on mantis bug tracker...

utnik

[GarryP]

You can achieve a very basic version of this effect from within Scribus using gradient fills with transparency, as long as your background is a solid colour. See attached image for examples.

I don't have the time to go into detailed instructions just now, but here's how you can do it.

For a circular fade:

* Put your image on the page.
* Draw a rectangle slightly larger than the image that surrounds the image.
* Set the fill colour to the page background colour.
* Change the fill type to "Radial gradient", then "Free radial gradient". (It's quicker doing it this way.)
* Move the left-hand stop to around 70% and set its Opacity to 0%.
* Press "Move Vector" and drag the top of the vector until the "fade" covers the top of the image.

You can then change the stop positions and the vector as necessary.

For a rectangular fade:

* Put your image on the page.
* Draw a rectangle slightly larger than the image that surrounds the image.
* Set the fill colour to the page background colour.
* Change the fill type to "Horizontal gradient".
* Set the left-hand stop to around 6% and the right-hand to around 12% and set its Opacity to 0%.
* Duplicate the rectangle, centre it over last one and flip it horizontally.
* Do the above again - from drawing the rectangle - but with a vertical gradient and flipping the duplicate vertically.

You'll probably have to mess around with the stop positions quite a bit to get something decent.

Neither is a particularly good way of doing this, and there are much better tools such as GIMP etc., but if you just want something simple - or don't want to use the other tools for whatever reason - you can get a decent effect within Scribus without too much work.

IMPORTANT: The transparency will only work on PDF 1.4 and better.

P.S. Throwing my hat into the ring, I think it would be nice for Scribus to have something like this built-in but I'd prefer the very-hard-working devs to be concentrating on more important things, like giving Scribus a rock-solid DTP base which can then be extended with features like this later if necessary. (Obviously "more important" is subjective.)

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