Miscellaneous Custom-shaped text boxes?

[CCCR]

Is there any way in Gimp to make a custom-shapped text box?

If not, is there some other program that allows for custom-shaped text boxes? It's really freaking annoying when I have a lot of text to cram into a box, and I need to use up as much of it as possible, but the only way to get the text to fit is the make a box completely encompassing the text bubble and just manually enter spaces/carriage returns in to align the text right. It would be nice if I could define the shape of the text area manually and let the program fit the text automatically.

I know you can in Illustrator, but Illustrator has decided that it's not going to load my fonts anymore, and I really didn't like it for typesetting anyway. I'd rather not use photoshop if that's my only choise though, as for basic Editing, photoshop is like using a bulldozer to build a sandcastle.

thanks.

 

[DelGrecco]

Just a quick thought on your font problem with Illustrator. I've found with some Adobe products that they'll start crashing if you move a font from the folder it was initially installed in. I moved one folder with only a handful of fonts a while back and it drove me crazy trying to figure out what had gone wrong. If you can't remember where the fonts were first installed you can uninstall all of the fonts that didn't come with your system and then reinstall them and the file paths Illustrator uses should update to the new locations and load them. Hope this helps.

 

[CCCR]

I installed Illustrator on a fresh windows 7 installation with no new fonts installed at all, and it had the problem right from the start.
I'm tempted to move up from CS2 and see if that would fix the problem, but I've found that upgrading Illustrator often causes more problems than it solves