easy ap purely for lettering signs

[Dreamer Fithp Apprentice]

Anyone know an EASY application purely for arranging text in an image? I can do it with gimp but I have to close it and start over and fight with it so much I'm ready to shoot my monitor.

All I want to do is put white letters on the background image of my choice (which happens to be a featureless black rectangle with white borders). It would be nice if the ap would automatically keep the text centered while I adjust the font size and let me select vertical orientation with letters arranged top to bottom, horizontal from left to right, or diagonal from top left to bottom right, and save the file as a simple black and white image, no layers or anything complicated. Gimp is way overkill and is causing me to lose my hair.

I do this to make icons for launchers. I'm color blind and nearsighted and I HATE cutesy-poo picture icons.

TIA if you can help.

[Hylas de Niall]

Inkscape, and then export as a bitmap?

[robert shearer]

Yes, Mashup.....
http://kornelix.squarespace.com/mashup/

and the deb package is here..
http://kornelix.squarespace.com/packages/

[Dreamer Fithp Apprentice]

Thanks, guys. Inkscape hasn't struck me as being as simple, limited, and quick as I was hoping for but I'll keep plugging away at it. Mashup I haven't been able to get to install yet. I'm thinking maybe I need to search windows programs to see if something like what I want exists that maybe I could run under wine. Or possibly I can get some sort fancy word processor to export a file as an image. Gotta be some quick and easy way to do this.

[robert shearer]

Step by step Mashup install...
open a terminal and run...

sudo apt-get install gdebi
when that finishes..

go to...http://kornelix.squarespace.com/packages/

and download the appropriate mashup .deb file
( mashup-3.5-i686.deb should work for most Ubuntu versions.
mashup-3.5-x86_64.deb if you are running 64-bit )

go to where you downloaded the .deb package (usually Downloads folder) and right click on it then choose...
Open with GDebi package installer.

This should install the deb package and/or report any dependencies.

If you encounter any errors post here. :)

[Dreamer Fithp Apprentice]

Thank you, Robert. You're explicit clarity shames me. I should have said I did all that. But I must have been sleep typing. It says clearly on the page with the deb that it is only for 11.04 and up and I was trying to install it on Maverick. I have an Oneiric installation on another partition which I keep tinkering with but I don't really consider it usable since Gnome 3 breaks all my scripts. Anyway, I tried it on there and it works. Not really what I'm after though. But thanks for the thought.