photo manipulation :: horizontal alignment

[cursor]

My dad sent me a JPG the other day that owns a misaligned batch of text. I'd like to somehow tweak the JPG file to make all of the lines of text very strictly horizontal. Anyone have ideas as to how?

I've very recently upgraded to Xara Designer Pro X10, by the way.

Please see attachment.

[Acorn]

I would use the Mould tool with the Default perspective shape and toggle the Mesh.
Basically, drag the bottom right control downward.

Afterwards, you can Slice the bottom back to square.

Good luck,
Acorn

[Rik]

Won't the Mould Tool distort the text?

Having had a second look at the image, it appears that the Mould Tool will do that job.
But, the quality of the text might suffer.

[handrawn]

you could try slicing it horizontally into several pieces and rotating each of these separately - the misalignment does not appear to be uniform - won't be perfect and you'll need to remake the background

[Igor01]

I cut it and squeeze parts differently:


I think, it is not so bad

[Gamerprinter]

Agreed on how it was done above. You'd have to slice the text into several horizontal slices, since the image looks stretched, and stretched unevenly - which is why mould alone won't fix it. You need a combination of stretched moulds done to several of the lines at varying levels to achieve the best result.

[Egg Bramhill]

I'd use Igors method as well. Slice the various parts of the page into small blocks. This is required as the missalignment isn't uniform over the whole page. Instead of using the mould tool I use the skew option to skew the text both horizontally & vertically to correct alignment.

I attach my effort as well as the xar file. Try looking it with the grid layer on & off, same with the background layer (a four colour fill based on the original documents corner colours) on & off. View the grid layer to check alignment.

EDIT: One problem using this method was with realigning the signatures, Suzzane Brady's in particular as this ran over two signature boxes, but a bit of tweaking soon fixed this

[angelize]

I wouldnt use the mould tool at all on this. I would slice as advised above but first I would make a completely new background by simply using a linear fill and picking colours from the original. Then my next step would be to remove the background on the photo before slicing. to do this with your photo selected select the mask painter and mask over areas of colour that you want to keep you will need to set the brush small and zoom in to get several areas of printed text and the signatures, you don't need to mask every little bit of text just a few spots here and there to get the light and dark areas of each colour. Next use the eraser tool and erase out a few bits of the background making sure to get different areas with different shades then click the erase background button on the eraser tool info bar and the program will do the rest. The mask likely won't be perfect but you are going to put it on the background with the same colours so it won't need to be perfect. now slice and dice and lay the pieces out straight on the new background.

[Egg Bramhill]

I would slice as advised above

Perhaps we're cross-posting here Frances so I'm not sure which post you're refering to.

Then my next step would be to remove the background on the photo before slicing

This seems like overkill to me. The original has a fairly straight forward fill of which a four coloured fill matching the originals corners seems to work fine but with some slight tweaking. Horses for Courses of course and we all do things in different ways

[handrawn]

all the posts from mine [#5] down advise slicing, I don't think Frances is being specific to any one, they are all above

I don't think it's worth extracting the text either, the background is easy enough to recreate as Egg says [though I might prefer to sample it]

a lot depends on how high a resolution image is available for the real thing