I thought that it would be rather a good idea to have Gurmukhi / Punjabi fridge magnets
(ਗੁਰਮੁਖੀ / ਪੰਜਾਬੀ ਫ਼ਰਿਜ ਮੈਗਨੈਟਸ).
It
would appear that in the UK, nobody actually makes them (If know of a source, just email me the details - I'm interested) but anybody with an image processor knows that
such a trivial thing shouldn't stop you from using them.
Using The GIMP, I have created a number of Gurmikhi fridge magnets, complete with
transparent drop shadow so that you can drop them into your images as you need them.
They are all the same font size (the directory display you can see on the right shows
the images according to their width so the bindi is displayed with the same height as a
sihari, even though it is a fraction of the size) so all you need to do is to drag them
from your directory and drop them into your image.
You can create desktop wallpapers easily like this so that they say anything you want.
I have made the colours of the vowels the same as the letters that go with them so when you
have to use them, they match (you can use an image processor to change them to whatever
colour you want any way). Note that there are no paer-bindi forms because, like real
fridge magnets, you would have separate plastic items anyway.
Just open up the directory with the images in, set it so that it displays the images in
alphabetical order and set it so that it shows the contents of each file. Then, grab the
image you want from the directory and drop it in your image in your image editor.
I have arranged the file names so that in alphabetical order, if you make the file
display wide enough to get five images on, the Gurmukhi alphabet is displayed correctly
(nine vowel images plus Oorda with a Horda).
You can see from the image below (this is what you get if you hover
the mouse over the image in Konqueror) that the drop-shadow isn't just an ordinary
drop shadow - it implies depth of the image that it is the shadow of.
Being fairly vague - as drop-shadows are - it will withstand a certain amount of rotation
before it starts to look a bit odd. It can easily withstand five degrees on a plain white background
and probably more on other backgrounds.
Just drag and drop your letters, rotate them individually as any fridge magnet would be
(they are never perfecty straight) and then position them. They are larger than you
would need for most purposes so any messing around you do will be hidden by the next step
which is to reduce their size to whatever you need and then finish off your image in the
usual manner.
The images on this site are free for for personal, non-profit use. If you want to use them commercially, contact me.
All you need to do to download them is to click on the compressed file below or visit the directory
with the images in ...
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Zip file
1,428,004 bytes
for Windows |
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| Tar Gz file
1,413,387 bytes
for UNIX/*BSD/Linux |
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| Images directory |
Just in case you needed a little bit more of Gurmukhi, I've also modified my Sudoku program so that it also creates Gurmukhi versions of Sudoku puzzles along with the last four of them on one page for you to print out. Just click on the link in the menu on the left - either on the Gurmukhi pages or on the Sudoku pages.
Enjoy...
