Hello All -

I'm still considering writing a short entry on "visual class" and/or "True Color" in the Glossary, although I don't want to go into all of the details of what the X Window System means by this.

Dust's response indirectly reminded me that Gimp is running on Gtk, even when it is on a Windows PC. I am terribly ignorant of how exactly Gtk does this. Is there some sort of "X Server" that runs on top of MS Windows, so the visual class displayed in the Info Window really, truly *is* exactly the same visual class that I am familiar with in X?

Thank you all.

(Now back to "adaptive supersampling" and "image hose"...)

Sally

Hello Sven and All -

I don't think that this is information that the user should be worrying about. Especially since most users nowadays are probably using a TrueColor visual anyway.

I agree that this information isn't terribly useful to the user and that the details of how the visual classes differ are far too esoteric. In fact, I have dragged my feet about defining it for the same reason. But I have noticed some confusion in the documentation itself, so I thought that a few words about it might be a good idea. Not all Gimp users are going to be programming experts.

No, there is no X server involved and there are differences but these differences are far beyond what belongs into the user manual.

OK, thank you. I'm not sure where to look up this information, so I do appreciate your response.

Note that the development version of GIMP doesn't even show the visual type in the Info window any longer. So, if you want my advice on this, remove this part from the user manual as well.

Thank you for that information, too. It does seem that the True Color description is not worthwhile at this point.

Best regards,

Sally

Hello Sven and All -

I agree that this information isn't terribly useful to the user and that the details of how the visual classes differ are far too esoteric.

In particular since GTK+ (or rather GDK) pretty much hides those differences. It is extremely difficult to tell the difference between a 16bit and a 24bit display if the rendering goes through GDK.

... which basically means (if I understand you correctly) that the entire GIMP rendering pipeline and I/O to and from files, etc. is done with the advertized 24-bit color depth, but the actual display may actually use only 16-bit color, without the user knowing about it (other than by looking at the image). Interesting.

Thanks again!

Sally