gimp/NEWS

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GIMP 1.2 - Hadjaha - New features -*- text -*-
The following list tries to describe all the new features that are
already implemented or currently being worked on. I cannot
guarantee that I describe everything correctly, since for most
items I haven't read the code but only looked at the ChangeLog
entry. I can however guarantee that a few things are missing...
[ Changes in versions 1.1.21 to 1.1.32 ]
Bug fixes We are getting ready for 1.2 ...
[ Changes in version 1.1.20 ]
Bug fixes Squeezing, squashing, crushing them ....
[ Changes in version 1.1.19 ]
Bug fixes The GIMP developers crew is working hard to
fix all known bugs. If you find a bug, please
check if it is still present in the latest
version. Then report it using the Bug Report
Form or send an email as described here.
Installation dialog A new much improved installation dialogs
guides you through the user-installation and
asks the user to set important values like
the tile_cache_size and the monitor
resolution.
I18n of Script-Fu Finally the UI of Script-Fu is fully
internationalized.
[ Changes in version 1.1.18 ]
Bug fixes The GIMP developers crew is working hard to
fix all known bugs. If you find a bug, please
check if it is still present in the latest
version. Then report it using the Bug Report
Form or send an email as described here.
[ Changes in version 1.1.17 ]
Bug fixes The latest versions shipped with broken
message catalogs that triggered a bug in
gtk+-1.2.6. This bug will be fixed in the
upcoming gtk+-1.2.7 and we have added a
workaround to prevent GIMP from crashing.
Lots of other bugs have been fixed too.
LibGimp We have started to document libgimp using
documentation gtk-doc. This should make it easier for
plug-in developers and will help them
especially to use all the new widgets and
convenience functions in libgimpui which make
the plug-ins look so nice.
[ Changes in version 1.1.16 ]
Bug fixes The GIMP developers crew is working hard to
fix all known bugs. If you find a bug, please
check if it is still present in the latest
version. Then report it using the Bug Report
Form or send an email as described here.
Localisation The internationalisation of GIMP's UI is
pretty much complete, which means that the
strings are marked for translation. Now,
those strings have to be translated of
course. Check out the translation status.
[ Changes in version 1.1.15 ]
Arrival of the help A first set of help pages for our new online
pages help system was added. If you want to help
Olof and Karin with that task, contact
olof@gimp.org.
It is also now possible to use Netscape to
read the help pages, if you don't want to (or
can't) use the internal helpbrowser.
Plugins overhaul Several GTK wrappers had made their way into
The GIMP over the last years making live hard
for developers and pushing a bad (IMHO)
coding style. We are now trying to get rid of
those libraries like gpc (RIP), megawidget
and libgck.
Most plug-ins now use helpful widgets from
libgimpui, which give much nicer layout and
better functionality (pressing F1 for Help
works in most plug-in windows now).
GAP Navigator Working with GIMP Animations is getting more
comfortable with the new GAP VCR Naviagtor
which provides a view on your GAP animation
frames in the style of the L&C-dialog.
[ Changes in version 1.1.14 ]
Internationalization I18n has been improved a lot lately. The core
is now fully marked for translation and the
plug-ins are following. Now what we need are
translators. Only very few languages are
supported by now.
Dialog layouts In an attempt to make the interface more
unification consistent, most plug-ins saw some small
changes to their dialog layout. You should
soon find the default buttons at the same
place in all dialogs.
[ Changes in version 1.1.13 ]
Not much There were some problems with the 1.1.12
release, that made it necessary to release
1.1.13 only a day later.
[ Changes in version 1.1.12 ]
Script-Fu bug fixed One of the most annoying bugs in the last
releases was fixed. Script-Fu scripts used to
crash the GIMP pretty regulary. Well, GDK
refcounting can be confusing...
Memleaks plugged With the help of memprof a whole bunch of
memleaks were found and lots of them plugged.
Layer move speedups Layer moving has been speed up by avoiding to
put each and every one-pixel move onto the
undo-stack.
Multiple previews The File Open dialog now allows to create
previews for multiple files at once. To
create previews for a whole directory, simply
select all files and press the Preview
button.
Menu Reorganization The core and plug-in menus were reorganized.
The new structure might take some time to get
used to, but it is more intuitive and
consistent.
[ Changes in version 1.1.11 ]
Bug fixes The GIMP developers crew is working hard to
fix all known bugs. If you find a bug, please
check if it is still present in the latest
version. Then report it using the Bug Report
Form or send an email as described here.
[ Changes in version 1.1.10 ]
Intelligent Scissors Finally Intelligent Scissors work again the
way they worked back in the old 0.54 days.
Hooray for Austin!!
Undo History the undo system was overworked and on the
surface a new dialog showed up showing a
history of the undoable steps performed on
the image. Very nice!
Export Finally The GIMP knows how to export files.
Or to be exact: it provides a way for
plug-ins to propagate their capabilities to
the core which will take care of opening a
dialog that proposes suitable conversion to
the user. These conversions are then
performed on a duplicate of the original
image.
Help System The GIMP now has a builtin help system.
Pressing F1 on whatever dialog starts the
helpbrowser on the related help-page. The
same works on a menu-entry. Olof and Karin
Kylander are already busy at writing the
documentation...
DnD was added to the helpbrowser so you can
now drag help to Netscape if you prefer
reading it there.
Brush Pipe Brush Pipes are now marked in the Brush
indicators Selection Dialog and the popup animates
through the pipe.
Bug fixes The GIMP developers crew is working hard to
fix all known bugs. If you find a bug, please
check that it is still present in the latest
version. Then report it using the Bug Report
Form or send an email as described here.
[ New features in version 1.1.9 ]
Enhanced pressure Using a pressure sensitive device you can now
support control what is affected by the pressure.
This can be opacity, brush-size and color.
New Path tool A new path manipulation tool was added that
is in early development stage and aims to be
a replacement for the bezier tool combining
bezier, spline and iscissor paths.
New Airbrush tool A new airbrush is under development that
promises to give you a much more natural
airbrush feeling with extended input devices
(graphic tablets).
Resizable toolbox Got annoyed so often that those GIMP windows
just don't fit to the screen the way you like
them? Now you can come closer since the
toolbox is resizable. Would you like a
horizontal toolbox better?
Navigation popup In the lower right corner of the image window
you will now find a button that pops up a
very handy navigation window similar to the
one you can access through the menus.
Indicators overhaul The small area at the bottom of the toolbox
has seen a total rewrite. Now the gradient is
displayed as well and all the preview code is
in one generic widget that is reused in the
devices status too.
Lotsa new plug-ins The GIMPressionist was added to the
distribution and its author directly came up
with a new thing out of the Vidar-Labs:
SphereDesigner. Other new plug-ins include
ImageMap, GFlare, PyGimp (Python scripting
support), AlienMap2, Color Enhance and Warp.
Deterministic Deterministic colour dithering to arbitrary
dithering palettes and deterministic alpha dithering
over layers. Don't ask, it's cool!
Twain Plugin for The new Twain plug-in gives you access to
Win32 Twain image sources like scanners on Win32
platforms.
Real-life units in This is more a call for help then a new
plug-ins feature. The framework has been there for
long, but still most plug-ins ignore
real-life units. I have changed the Grid
plug-in to make use of the nice widgets that
libgimp offers to handle all the unit stuff.
The code is heavily commented to make it more
easy to copy from it. So if you read this and
are a plugin author or you fell you could
help anyway, go hack those plug-ins! If you
need help, drop me a line.
JPEG saving with Not only offers the new JPEG plug-in much
Preview more control over the saving parameters, it
also shows you what the result will look
like.
More Drag'n'Drop Support for Dnd is coming along. You can now
drag layers from the Layers'n'Channels-dialog
to the toolbox to create a new image with
only that layer. Or drop the layer on an
image to add it to the images layerstack.
Also Color DnD is now supported almost
everywhere and you can drag brushes and
patterns around in the device status dialog.
Image Pipe Pixmap brushes were just recently added, but
it doesn't end there. Now there's an image
pipe. This is a brush that draws with a
pixmap out of a list of pixmaps. The pixmap
is either choosen randomly or based on cursor
direction, pressure or tilt. You'll love it!
New measure tool A new tool that allows to measure arbitray
distances and angles in an image was added.
See a (dumb) screenshot here.
Image navigation The new navigation window helps you to
navigate through large images. Have a look at
it here.
Scaled brush The brush selector now scales the brushes so
previews that they fit into the preview area. Click
here for a screenshot.
Pixmap brushes Pixmap brushes are being added. This will
allow you to paint with small colored images.
New Win32 plugin A new plug-in allows you to copy and paste
between different Windoze applications and
The GIMP using the clipboard.
[ New features in version 1.1.8 ]
Better cubic The algorithms for the cubic interpolation
interpolation for transformation were replaced by faster/
better ones.
Wheel mouse support Wheel mice are now supported in a variety of
Gimp dialogs.
New Plugins Sample Colorize and Curve Bend were added to
the distribution. Additionally two new
plug-ins for the Win32 port were added that
allow to print and to take screenshots on Win
platforms.
[ New features in version 1.1.7 ]
Selection to Path A new plug-in allows you to convert a
selection into an editable bezierpath.
Drag'n'Drop You can now drop a file (out of GMC for
example) onto the toolbox and The GIMP will
try to load it. This also works with URLs
(that you can drag out of netscape).
QuickMask Finally we have QuickMask in The GIMP. IMHO
the UI still needs a little tweak, but it
works perfectly as you can see here.
Paste As New You can know directly paste the content of
the buffer into a new image. Saves a few
mouse-clicks.
Win32 portability It is now possible to build a fully
functioning GIMP on Win32 with free tools
only.
IFS Compose saves One day you did that wonderful tree with IFS
and loads Compose and since then you've never ever
managed to get those parameters right again?
Now IFS Compose can save and load his
settings.
New tools Finally the empty holes in the toolbox got
filled and we have Dodge and Burn and Smudge
tools.
Help Browser Work has started on a Help System for The
GIMP and the helpbrowser is already done! Now
Karin and Olof (authors of The GUM) can start
to work on the documentation.
Image preview cache Thumbnail previews of an image are now
handled in a central place, so that small
previews can be computed from larger ones in
the cache. Right now this is used in the
image-menu (e.g. in the L&C-Dialog), more
will follow.
Tear-off menus The rumours have come true and while the
concept of an active image evolves, tear-off
menus sprang to life.
[ New features in version 1.1.6 ]
Active image concept Preliminary code to add an active image
concept has been added. So far the first cool
thing you get from this is that the
Layers-n-Channels-dialog automagically tracks
the image you're currently working on.
Interesting things will happen here. Tear-off
menus are rumoured to appear soon...
Indicator area The toolbox has been extended to show the
current brush and pattern you are using
giving direct access to the related dialogs.
This will soon be extended to also show you
the current gradient.
Bug fixes Bug fixes, bug fixes, bug fixes all over the
place. Hopefully not too much new ones were
added...
Colored Curves Color in the previously greyscale bars to the
dialog left and below the curve itself. This still
needs to be done for the Levels dialog too.
New File-New dialog Yep, another change to the dialog. Hopefully
everyone is content with the layout/
functionality this time.
Line draw preview You do know that you can draw a straight line
using the Shift key with the paint tools,
don't you? Now you can even position this
line precisely using the new line-preview.
Unfortunately this is quite buggy right now
and absolutely needs to be redone (and I can
say this as I've implemented this
feature...). UPDATE: This should work now.
Tile Row Hinting The image compositing has been speed up by
implementing hints to the tile structure.
That way the render-engine knows for example
if a row is totally transparent and can skip
the calculation.
Waterselect The waterselect plug-in has been integrated
color-selector as a pluggable color-selector module.
Context cursors Work has begun on giving better user feedback
through context cursors. For example the
selection tools now indicate whether you are
adding or subtracting the selection by adding
a small plus or minus sign to the cursor.
[ New features in version 1.1.5 ]
New Scale/Resize UI The Scale and Resize dialogs have been
overworked and it is now possible to change
the image resolution interactively.
OS/2 portability Lots of changes to make this version of The
Gimp compile on OS/2. This is still a work in
progress as is the Win32 portability.
Tool toggles Tools behaviuor for tools like Flip, Crop,
Convolve can be easily toggled on the fly
using the Shift key.
Opaque layer moves Layer are moved opaque now. That is you don't
only see the dashed outline move but the
whole content. Helps a lot when positioning
layers.
Per tool paint This is toggleable in the Preferences and
options adds the paintbrush options like Opacity to
every tool so you can have different settings
for different tools.
Sample average The color-picker can now optionally average
color-picker the neighborhood of pixels instead only
giving you the pixel you click at.
Speedups The color-correction functions as well as the
histogram functions have been optimized and
make use of multi-processor machines.
Global parasites Global parasites (arbitrary data attached to
the Gimp process) have been there for longer,
but now they are saved and can be retrieved
through the PDB.
Tool options The layout of all tools has changed slightly.
redesign They look more uniform, have a nice
Reset-button and inactive widgets are greyed
about giving better user feedback.
Crop tool overhaul The former crop tool is now called Crop &
Resize and allows you to interactively resize
layers or the image. Autocrop functionality
has also been added.
Interactive Curves Curves dialog now has interactive feedback.
Press and drag the mouse button in the image
window and a marker will appear in the curves
dialog showing the channel value at that
point.
New plug-ins New plug-ins were added: Rotate ColorMap
allows you to shift ranges of colors to new
values much like the way you know it from XV.
GDynText has been added and integrated as an
optional replacement for the text tool. It
allows you to add editable text layers. Oh,
it really rocks!!
PDBgen integration The PDB (Procedural Database) calls for the
gimp functions that allow you to call gimp
internals from scripts and plug-ins are now
autogenerated using some Perl-magic.
More work on unit Support for real-world units is coming along
support and is now supported by the gimp core in most
of the places where it makes sense.
[ New features in version 1.1.4 ]
New plug-ins Three new plug-ins were added to the
distribution: The wmf plug-in loads files of
the Windows(tm) metafile file format. GAP,
the Gimp Animation Plug-in, gives access to a
bunch of functions for working on and
creation of animations. The xjt plug-in
combines the functionality of the XCF file
format with JPEG compression.
Gradient The paintbrush can now be configured to use
brush-strokes the current gradient as its color-source.
This allows for some very nice effects. A
not-so-nice one can be seen here.
User-defined units The framework for user-defined units has been
added. If you like to measure your images in
lightyears, you can now do so and the unit
definition will be saved with your work in
the XCF file.
Power-user shortcuts Modifier keys (Shift|Ctrl|Alt) can now be
used with the buttons in the L&C-dialog and
give quick access to functions like Move
Layer to Top and others. Additionally a
button for Channel To Selection has been
added.
XCF loading/saving XCF files do not only load and save much
speedups faster, they also compress a little better
then before. However full backward
compatibilty is preserved.
More preferences The preferences dialog is seeing a major
cosmetic overhaul. There's a new widget to select
directories and recently the dialog has been
reordered to use a tree instead of notebook
tabs.
Plug-in updates A bunch of plug-ins including but not limited
to wind, bumpmap, exchange, sharpen and mail
have seen bugfixes and/or enhancements.
[ New features in version 1.1.3 ]
Paths dialog The Layers&Channels-dialog now features a new
page: Paths. This allows you to conveniently
add and remove points from your bezier paths
and to save, delete and modify paths.
Additionally it is an easy way to crash your
Gimp.
Real-world unit The integration of real-world units into The
support Gimp is going on nicely. The basics are
there: You can choose your favorite unit/
resolution in the Preferences, use it when
creating a new image and the information is
displayed in the statusbar.
Better RGB->Indexed The box-cut quantizer used in RGB->INDEXED
conversion conversion has been revised and should give
better results now.
Win32 merges Tor Lillqvist started to merge his changes
for Win32 into The Gimp source. For more info
have a look at the GIMP Win32 page.
Configurable image The string that is displayed in the image
title title is now configurable. It can for example
show the display zoom factor.
Perl A lot of work has been put into the Perl
plugin recently, but as long as I haven't
managed to build it on my system, I can't say
anything about this...
[ New features in version 1.1.2 ]
New plugin: This new plugin allows you to browse the
Plugindetails plugin menu system and helps to find the
plug-in you've lost in the menu jungle weeks
ago. See it in action here.
Thumbnails Gimp now automagically saves xv-compatible
thumbnails upon image saves. And of course,
the load dialog shows them.
More fun with Ink The Ink-tool now allows the user to choose
between elliptical, square, and diamond
shaped brushes.
Parallelization In addition to all the work that's been put
into threads, true parallelization is now
being added. Choose your number of processors
and make The Gimp fly...
Triangular Due to the ease of adding new color-selectors
Color-Selector via modules, a nice new triangular one has
appeared. Have a look at this screenshot.
[ New features in version 1.1.1 ]
File->Revert A function that reverts your image to the
version on disk was added.
Pluggable There's now the possibility to add
Color-Selectors color-selector modules to the Gimp. Next to
the standard rectangular one you'll now find
the circle that is used for Script-Fu.
More speed, less Optimizations using copy-on-write were
memory applied to more internal functions to bring
you a faster, less memory-consuming Gimp.
Improved JPEG The JPEG plugin now handles comments,
handling resolution and progressive saving.
Progress indicators Most if not all timeintensive core-functions
now change the cursor to indicate that gimp
is busy and show their progress in the
statusbar.
Tab hides dialogs Ever wished to get rid of all the dialogs
floating around on your screen? Well, with
the new version, you press the TAB-key and
they go away ... and can be brought back
using the TAB-key again.
Gimp class generator Well, I'm not sure if I got this right, so
here's what Yosh said about it: "[GCG] is
autogening that gtk+ class drugdery". Should
make coding easier.
Spiral gradients A new gradient type was introduced: spiral
gradients. Have a look at this small sample.
Palette dialog The palette dialog has seen an overhaul.
Things haven't settled yet, but the new
dialog looks much nicer and, unlike the old
one, can handle large amounts of palettes.
[ New features in version 1.1.0 ]
XInput support GIMP now supports special input devices like
drawing tablets by default. It depends on the
device being supported by your XServer. For
example, Wacom drawing tablets are often
supported. Support for multiple devices,
pressure and tilt sensitivity is slowly being
added to all paint tools.
Ink tool A nice new toy that really comes to life if
you have an extended input device as
described above. Have a look at this
screenshot.
'File New' dialog The New Image dialog allows the use of real
life units like centimeters and inches along
with a resolution entry. Have a look at this
screenshot.
Hex display A small but nifty feature was added to the
Color Picker: It now displays the HEX triplet
of the selected color. Useful for WEB
artists.
Popup button The small rectangle between the rulers in the
upper left corner of the image window now
gives access to the menu. Usefule for people
with tablets or two-button mice.
Statusbar The image display now has a statusbar.
Plug-ins write their progress there and your
mouse coordinates are also displayed. Most
tools use it too. The Selection tool, for
example, shows the selection size while you
drag. Have a look at this screenshot. And
don't worry, it's possible to hide the
statusbar to save screen estate.
GUI enhancements Lots of nifty enhancements to the user
interface. Spinbuttons are used in a lot of
places. More stuff like that has to be added
in the future...
Session management GIMP remembers window positions and sizes
(eeek, not working currently, but its almost
there) and restores them on startup.
Selections New algorithms are now used to grow and
shrink the selection. The result looks much
better!
PDB interface A lot more internal functions are now
exported to the PDB. For example, this should
allow the GIMP Animation Plugin to work
without changes to the GIMP core.
Better tile-caching Tiles are now more intelligently cached and a
threaded process tries to swap out dirty
tiles before you run out of physical memory.
(Hmm, have I got this right? IIRC, there's a
thread to swap in stuff ahead of the time,
too.)
Copy On Write The MAD-COW patches that appeared too late to
get integrated into GIMP-1.0 are now
integrated. And...its FASTER!!
Document Index The document index keeps track of the images
you used with The GIMP. You can even drag in
an image from a file-manager (GNOME MC for
example).
Editable Brushes Well, editable brushes still need some work,
but the basics are there...
Fixed size The size or the aspect ratio of selections
selections can now be entered numerically as well.
Script-Fu interface The Script-Fu dialog now allows a whole bunch
improvements of entry widgets, like selectors for fonts,
brushes, gradients and patterns. Strings can
be entered without the nasty quotes and
numerical entries can use sliders and
spinbuttons. Have a look at this screenshot.
Most of the scripts were already updated.
Quick Reference The Quick Reference sheet looks much better
and holds more information. A must-have for
your desktop.
Transform Tool UI The user interface for the Transform tool has
seen a major overhaul. It now offers a new
'Corrective' mode that for example makes it
easy to correct slightly rotated scans. Have
a look at this screenshot.
Color representation GIMP now uses GdkRGB to provide better
dithering for non truecolor displays. This
should also speed GIMP up a bit.
Parasites Arbitrary data can be attached to an image
and be retrieved later. (Is this already
saved in the XCF file? I think not...)
Tatoos A unique stamp can be attached to drawables.
That way a plug-in can easily keep track of
layers.
Dialogs A few dialogs can now be controlled via the
PDB. That allows a plug-in to use the
internal dialogs to select brushes, patterns
and gradients.
Idle-Renderer Display re-rendering is now handled in an
interruptible asynchronous thread. This makes
The GIMP more responsive, especially when
working with the Layers-dialog.
Resolution support Each image now has a resolution associated
with it. This needs to be integrated better
into the GUI, but there are already a few
file plug-ins that make use of this.
GimpPerl The GIMP-Perl extension is now part of
GIMP-1.1.
Monitor resolution The image can now be displayed in float scale
factrors. If GIMP knows about your monitor
resolution it displays one inch as one inch.
Still needs some work...
Help in the DB The DB Browser now also display the help that
Browser is available for a lot of functions in the
PDB.
Internationalization National Language Support is coming!
New plug-ins Various new plug-ins were added. More have
appeared in the Registry and wait to be added
or updated. A few nice ones that are now
included:
* WaterSelect - a nifty way to select
colors
* NewsPrint - whee, you have to see that
* Guillotine - slices the image up along
its guides
Internals Lots of changes were made to GIMP internals
that I don't understand correctly, like
objectification and removal of the image ID
system. Read the ChangeLog yourself to figure
this out.
GTK+ compatibilty GIMP 1.1 makes use of the development version
of GTK+. Therefore a whole lot of work has
been put in following the GTK+ development
and keeping The GIMP in sync.
Plug-ins and Scripts Various plug-ins and scripts not mentioned
above have been updated or fixed to work with
changes in the GIMP core or GTK+. One day I
might add a list of all changed plug-ins to
this list...
Miscellaneous * The painting functions (brush, pencil,
airbrush, etc.) have been optimized.
* The GAP plugin, which has some essential
animation features, is being integrated
into GIMP.
* The font selector has been redesigned.
* The new, slightly incomplete MAINTAINERS
file should help track responsibility and
expertise for various parts of The GIMP.
Copyright 1998-2000 by Sven Neumann <sven@gimp.org>