How to Create a Simple Plus Sign with a Transparent Background
In my job as a Technical Writer, I am often called upon to be a "jack of all trades" in terms of my documentation. That means, in this case, that I also have to provide all of the graphics. A lot of what I do is from screen captures of web applications, but I also need to create diagrams and other images, including symbols. There are a number of resources on the web for clip art, but occasionally, they won't give you what you need. Once, I needed to create a "plus sign" for a symbolic diagram I was developing. I couldn't find one on the web, so I needed to use GIMP to draw one. Here's how I did it.
- Open GIMP.
- Click File and then click New to open a Create a New Image dialog.
- Size it 300 x 300 pixels.
- Click Advanced Options.
- Use the Fill with menu to select Transparency.
- Open another GIMP image of the same size but select a White background with the Fill with menu.
- Select the desired foreground color for the plus sign.
- Select the rectangle tool.
- Create a vertical rectangle that will be the basis for the vertical and horizontal bars of the plus sign.
- Click Edit and then click Fill with FG (foreground) color.
- Click Edit and then click Cut.
- Close the now empty file without saving it.
- Go to the first GIMP file without the visible layer and click Edit, then click Paste Into.
- Save this file as plus.png.
- Close the file.
- Right click on the file in your pictures directory and click Copy.
- Right click in an empty area of the pictures directory and then click Paste.
- Open both the original and copy of the plus files in GIMP.
- In the copy of the plus file, click Edit and then click Copy Visible.
- Click on the selection (lasso) tool in the GIMP toolbox.
- In the original plus file, click Edit and then click Paste Into.
- Right-click on the pasted in image, click on Tools, then Transform Tools, and then Rotate.
- In the Rotate dialog, in the Angle field, enter 90.00 and click Rotate.
- Click File and then click Save.