Creating a background texture with text/graphic

* Creating a background texture with text/graphic
@ 2012-10-29 10:50 Mari Voipio
  2012-10-29 11:07 ` Marco Patzer
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 3+ messages in thread
From: Mari Voipio @ 2012-10-29 10:50 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: mailing list for ConTeXt users

Hello all!

While staring at the pile of ConTeXt instruction book(let)s on my
desk, I realized that I should be able to use a logo or a text to
create a background texture to use in scrapbooking and cardcraft. The
problem is that my skills don't quite stretch that far and I can't
remember where I once saw the code for this...

The logo I'm thinking of is originally an Inkscape svg file that I've
this far used in ConTeXt in pdf format. Other available and compatible
vector formats are at least plain svg, ps eps and pdf.

Possible solution 1:
to insert the logo in MetaPost and use loops, rotate, shft and
randomize to create a texture. Loop+shift would make a nice
alternating background, randomized with loop and 90degree rotation
steps would make a denser texture.

The problem: I don't know how to input the logo graphic into Metapost
code. This did not work, even though the pdf is in the same directory:

externalfigure "vaaka-logo.pdf" scaled 1cm;

Don't know if I'm missing something here, this snippet comes from the
MetaFun manual p. 199. Unfortunately I don't have pstoedit on my Mac,
so the conversion trick on page 198 doesn't work for me.

For text there're more ideas and I think I can handle that based on
MetaFun manual p. 92 + randomize, but with the external figure I'm at
loss on how to do it.

Possible solution 2:

ConTeXt. Insert here some code I don't have a clue about. Might be
ConTeXt only or ConTeXt and Metapost/Metafun together.  Inserting the
graphic is no big deal in this case, \externalfigure will do that.

(I got almost what I wanted by tweaking an older label/imposition
file, but I have some weird margin issues there and the positioning
system is not very exact and there are a bit too many things that
affect the layout. I'd rather put stuff on a grid than just tweak it
with the location and margin settings. That's the Word way, in the
long run not the smartest way of doing things. I'm planning to use
this feature a lot, so I'd rather code something that stands for
longer.)

Feel free to point me towards the correct wiki pages, my problem may
just be that I cannot come up with the correct search term,
"background" is not a very good one. And of some reason the garden is
not very good at scrapbooking terms (yet). ;-)

Note. On the moment I have no need to put text on top of those
textures, and I'm not worried about that bit anyway, layers usually
work nicely there. Now I'm interested into creating a "personilized"
background texture onto which I can e.g. glue a chipboard shape or
paper flower or a bit of glitter. It feels stupid to pay for so called
digital stamps/textures/backgrounds when I have the tools to create
some myself. Running text is easy, but using and reusing one logo
would be more fun. :-)

Thanks,

Mari
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