Printing exactly what you need!

Around a month ago I posted a quick tutorial that showed how you could alter the colour of some of my (print & paste) textures to make a few alternative bits and pieces for your dungeons (you can read the article HERE).

Well, I thought I'd take it a step further this month and show how you can use a similar technique to print out custom sheets that only contain the bits you want (a whole page full of 'book textures' for example) - so here goes...

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OK, we'll first need to open GIMP (a free image editing program), and import the relevant page from the pdf file in question - just like we did in the previous tutorial (i.e. Choose FILE > OPEN and locate the pdf, and then open the page you're interested in - making sure to input a value of 300 pixels per inch, and turning off anti-aliasing ...as I say, it's all explained in the previous tutorial HERE).

Then, we're going to make a new image as well - and we can do this by selecting FILE > NEW from the menu,  and selecting either the 'A4 (300ppi)' or the 'US LETTER (300ppi)' template (depending upon which page size you're using), and press OK.

And as you can see (if you look at the highlighted area near the top left corner), you'll now have two documents open (the page of the pdf we loaded previously, and a new blank page) ...and we can flip back and forth between the two by simply clicking on these thumbnails.

OK, next we'll need to make the 'textures' page visible (by clicking on the thumbnail in the top left corner that I just mentioned), and then select the 'Rectangle Select Tool' (highlighted in the top left of the following picture), and draw a box around the pieces we are interested in (in this example, all the 'bone pile' textures).

Then press CTRL & C together (to copy the selected part of the image), go back to the blank page (by clicking on its thumbnail), and press CTRL & V to paste the previously selected part of the image into this new document.

However, if you don't want it located in the middle of the page, you can simply drag it nearer the top - like so...

...and if you want to print a whole page of the same texture, just press CTRL & V again (to paste more of that texture into this document), and drag the resulting copies into position (or you could also copy and paste textures from several different pdf's to suit whatever you're building at the time).

And there you have it!

It's a pretty simple procedure (and I often do something similar myself) - which will save you wasting paper and ink by allowing you to only print the textures you want/need.

Anyway, I hope this has been of help - but if you have any issues, please feel free to get in touch.

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IMPORTANT NOTE: Please feel free to alter the textures as much as you like for your own personal use ...however please do not share any variations of these files publicly. Thank you.