On Tuesday 23 November 2004 11:45, John Culleton wrote:

I note that the newest version of Gimp will allow for vector layers in some way. This is a very positive step. But I haven't heard about CMYK color model lately. Since my major use is in preparing materials for print this would not be a step but a leap forward. Are there plans for anything new on the CMYK front? Ideally (for printers) Gimp would output a postscript or even a pdf file using vectors instead of bitmaps and with colors expressed in cmyk terms. Is such a capability on the drawing board yet?

Hi!

No.
The CMYK color modle shall be made available when the GIMP gets integrated with GEGL - "GEneric Graphics Library" - a project started by the Gimp developers themselves to more or less become the Gimp core. Them we will have 16bit and floating point color depths, and CMYK.

Unfortunattely, GEGL is a bit late. What is actually needed for professional pritners is not CMYK, though, but color profiling. There is some rough support for color profiling already, and the panas are to make it a lot better for GIMP 2.4 - which will be the other (not the very soom stable, which will be 2.2) stable GIMP.

As for postscript output - if you want vector output, you probably are looking at the wrong software. There are inkscape and sodipody which work with vector graphics.

I had implemented a script to output GIMP paths to postscript tough. Due to limitations on the vectors API on gimp 2.0, and gimp 2.2 it will not work with all vectors, but can work with vectors with closed componnents only. I did it because from time to time I hand craft some postscript apps, and this was a nice way to get drawings into my own postscripts.

You will find this script at: http://hopey.nervo.org/~gwidion/gimp

Hi,

John Culleton writes:

I note that the newest version of Gimp will allow for vector layers in some way. This is a very positive step. But I haven't heard about CMYK color model lately. Since my major use is in preparing materials for print this would not be a step but a leap forward. Are there plans for anything new on the CMYK front? Ideally (for printers) Gimp would output a postscript or even a pdf file using vectors instead of bitmaps and with colors expressed in cmyk terms. Is such a capability on the drawing board yet?

There's a plug-in to export CMYK TIFF files. That's been around for quite a while. I don't know who's feeding you your information but that person is highly misinformed since there are no vector layers. If you want postscript or even pdf files using vectors instead of bitmaps, you are looking at the wrong application. GIMP is an image manipulation program for editing raster graphics. If you want to edit vectors, please use a vector editing application.

Sven

Sven wrote:

I don't know who's feeding you your information but that person is highly misinformed since there are no vector layers. If you want postscript or even pdf files using vectors instead of bitmaps, you are looking at the wrong application. GIMP is an image manipulation program for editing raster graphics. If you want to edit vectors, please use a vector editing application.

The Gfig plugin now creates its own layers, and they are vector layers because if you run Gfig with the active layer being a Gfig layer, you can manipulate the objects there as vector objects. Dave Neary's GIMP 2.2 headlines mention this, with perhaps a bit more enthusiasm than is entirely justified -- this is presumably the source of the "misinformation". In any case, the capabilities of Gfig are quite primitive in comparison with well-developed vector graphics programs such as Sodipodi or Inkscape -- and strictly speaking, the functionality does not come from GIMP itself but rather from the plugin. The rest of what you wrote I think is quite correct.

It may be interesting to note that it would theoretically be possible to modify programs such as Inkscape or Sodipodi so that they would be capable of running as GIMP plugins, creating their own special layers and storing their data as "layer attachments" (i.e., "parasites" in GIMP terminology), in the same way that Gfig now does. (This is also basically how the Text tool works, except it doesn't use parasites.) Such an approach could give GIMP full-powered SVG-vector-editing capabilities without requiring any major changes in the GIMP core.

Best, -- Bill

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Hi,

"William Skaggs" writes:

It may be interesting to note that it would theoretically be possible to modify programs such as Inkscape or Sodipodi so that they would be capable of running as GIMP plugins, creating their own special layers and storing their data as "layer attachments" (i.e., "parasites" in GIMP terminology), in the same way that Gfig now does. (This is also basically how the Text tool works, except it doesn't use parasites.)

Sorry, but that is not correct. The text tool does use parasites but that is about the only similarity with GFig.

Such an approach could give GIMP full-powered SVG-vector-editing capabilities without requiring any major changes in the GIMP core.

GIMP wouldn't get any vector-editing capabilities from that. It would just be an akward way of having two apps work together without really talking to each other. There is no synchronization whatsoever. This holds true for GFig as well and that is why I think the GFig hack is terrible and I would like to phase it out during the next development cycle.

Sven