A brief rant about Gimp

This morning in my writing time I’ve been working on a piece titled “I stopped drinking booze and coffee for a year : Here is what it did to my health …”. But I won’t be releasing that one until I’ve got my blood test results for the “after” profile.

While doing that article I took a brief foray into creating an info graphic of a drawing I did a year ago.

Here is the original drawing (including the caption currently in my article):

I’m sorry this is the hand drawn version, I just spent far far too long attempting to draw boxes with dotted lines in Gimp and gave up utterly defeated.

I spent a very long time in Gimp attempting to draw a box with a dashed (stroked) line. At the end I felt like a failure, pathetic.

Drawing a box with a dotted line just seems like it should be a simple task. These days, with everything that has happened in tech in the past 20 years.

I feel like a real failure when I’m unable to do something so simple as this.

I think it is always graphic design type tasks.

Maybe it would be different if I forked out for Paintshop. But really, like $50 / month so that I can draw a dotted box twice a year, I can’t justify it.

What I have ended up doing is going back to Paintbrush.

It still can’t draw boxes with dashed lines mind you — but it is easier to hand draw them than it is in Gimp — and so that’s what I’ve gone with.

You will need to wait until I publish the other piece before seeing the result (it isn’t over the top glamorous — don’t hold your breath). But the article should be good — not at all like this one.