Scott,

First, it's not clear whether you are bothered by the resources Gimp consumes in creating lots of layers, or by the nuisance of managing them. If it's the former, don't worry about it: text layers are very lightweight, and you can create hundreds of them without putting much of a burden on Gimp. If it's the latter, that's a different story. At some point Gimp will get the ability to group layers together and collapse the groups in the Layers dialog, but not quite yet.

The best suggestion that I can think of, if you really want the old nasty behavior back, since your situation is probably so unusual as not to be worth supporting in the core, is that it would be possible to write a plug-in that would behave more or less like the old text tool: you would make a selection, activate the plug-in, a dialog box would pop up allowing you to type some text, and when you press Okay the text would be written onto the image at the site of your selection.

Best, -- Bill

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Hi,

"William Skaggs" writes:

First, it's not clear whether you are bothered by the resources Gimp consumes in creating lots of layers, or by the nuisance of managing them. If it's the former, don't worry about it: text layers are very lightweight, and you can create hundreds of them without putting much of a burden on Gimp.

That's not really true. A text layer takes as much resources as a pixel layer of the same size. Actually it even takes a tiny little bit more in order to store the text information.

Sven

Hi,

skod@ises-llc.com (Scott Griffith at ISES-LLC) writes:

The only way I've found of imitating the old Gimp behavior is to tediously "merge down" the newly created layer after each item is entered- a very, very painful and extremely time consuming process when working with extremely large files (each merge takes 25-30 seconds in the file I'm currently working with).

Is there a workaround? Failing that, can this be regarded as a plea for a backwards compatible render-to-active-layer mode in the Preferences (or tool options) for those few of us users who actually liked it (and depended on it!) the old braindead way it was?

I don't think there's a workaround expect "Merge Down". I am surprised that you are saying that "Merge Down" takes considerable time. You should be able to bind a keybinding to it and have it done rather fast. May I ask how large your images are and what average size of text layers you are working with? I am also interested in what tile-cache size you configured since I wonder if perhaps GIMP is working on the swap file if it's that slow for you.

Sven

On Monday 28 June 2004 22:19, Scott Griffith at ISES-LLC wrote:

After RTFM and finding no workaround, I tried to check the archives of these mailing lists for clues, but the archives I was able to locate at lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU haven't been re-indexed since September of 2003. A search of the rawfiles produced only discussion of the new features, and Google searches did not provide any useful information either. So: I'm going to the source, so to speak. (;-)

Just to note that this mailing list has an archive at www.mail-archive.com:

http://www.mail-archive.com/gimp-developer%40lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/

Which is up to date and searchable.

I had difficulty finding a good archive as well.

Regards,

Shlomi Fish

On Wednesday, June 30, 2004, 10:27:54, Shlomi Fish wrote:

I had difficulty finding a good archive as well.

I always found gmane's interface nicer than mail-archive:

(and it allows nntp access)