Crosshatch-Fu

A Gimp Crosshatch Script-Fu filter
Copyright © 2011 Bart Massey
[email protected]
2011-07-20

This filter started with a need for an etching of Lewis Carroll for a talk I gave at the Open Source Bridge Conference 2011. It turns out I couldn't easily find one, so I looked for a GIMP plugin to process a photo into a synthetic etching. After some digging around, the most promising thing I could find was a Perl plug-in posted by Sam Jones in 2001 to an email list.

I've taken Jones's plugin as an inspiration, and written a GUILE Scheme Script-Fu plugin with similar operation. My plugin produces marginal-quality synthetic etchings.

If you like, the code will leave the layers it constructed lying around when it is done; you can adjust each layer as desired and then merge them manually. The layers are a "penciled-in" layer, with NW and NE crosshatch layers above that.

Installation

Install this just like any other Gimp Script-Fu plugin. For Linux and Mac OS X, this means copying crosshatch.scm to ~/.gimp-2.6/scripts/ and restarting Gimp. For Windows, copy into C:\Program Files\GIMP-2.0\share\gimp\2.0\scripts or something--I'm not a Windows user, so I don't really know.

Future Work

Planned future enhancements include some more control over the etching. It would be nice to have preview mode, but it looks like that would require rewriting this code in something other than Scheme, and I'm not really up for another rewrite.

License and Availability

I have placed my code under GPLv2 to clarify GIMP license compatibility. Please see the file COPYING in this distribution for license details. I do not believe that my current code is a derivative work of Sam Jones's code per US copyright law. I have attempted to contact Sam Jones without success. Hopefully, he will appear at some point and give the project his blessing.

This project is currently hosted on GitHub. See its project page for source repository information.