Easy Text Backgrounds

Finished project
You will need MS Word or another text editor to complete this tutorial. This tutorial assumes Word, I cannot provide help for other text editors.
Blank background Create a plain background image.

File-> New, make the image the size that you want your project to be. Fill this with a pattern, or create your own paper background using any method you prefer. For the sake of download time, I'm going to make an image that's 300 pixels square. Layers-> New Raster Layer.

  
Finding some text Find some text.

A really great source for literature of all kinds is Bartleby. For the sample here, I did a search of the Columbia Encyclopedia using the word "dog" as a search term. On the webpage, click and drag to highlight the text that you want. Right click and choose Copy.

  
  Open Word and paste in.

Open Word or another text editor. Edit-> Paste Special-> Unformatted Text. Go through the text and remove the paragraph numbers, add in any carriage returns between paragraphs if you want. Highlight all of the text to select it and change the font and size to whatever you like. Here I've used a font called "Violation" at 18 pt. Word is going to put some icky stuff in there where it thinks it has found spelling and grammatical errors. To get rid of this, Tools-> Options-> Spelling and Grammar, checkmark both "Hide spelling errors in this document" and "Hide grammatical errors in this document". You should now have plain black text on a white background. If it got unselected, reselect it. Edit-> Copy.

  
Finished image Paste into your image.

Go back to PSP and your image. Set your background color swatch to white. Edit-> Paste as Transparent Selection. An import dialog will come up. Since I made my image 300 pixels wide, I'll set the Import width to 300. Move the selection to the top left of your image, Selections-> Select None. On the layer control palette, lower the opacity of the text layer until it looks realistic. Here, I've set it to 70%. If you find that your text is too small, you can undo and then go back into Word and set your font size to be larger.