Pierre-Alexis (pierre_alexis@yahoo.com) wrote:

I have a couple of thoughts that may (or may not) interest you :
- it's too bad that Gimp's filters' previews don't allow you to zoom in/out... it makes them almost useless in many cases ! it's sad too that some filters don't even have a preview...
- it's a little strange (but not serious) that filters previews are to be seen in a little preview windows, while other tools' previews (curves, hue-saturation, and so on...) are to be seen in the main window... it give a "non rigorous" feeling...

What do you think of all this ? Does it read relevant to you ?

It surely is relevant, but it isn't new. When discussing the introduction of a common preview widget for the plugins (which did not exist in 2.0) all these ideas have already been floating around.

Unfortunately everything boils down to that somebody has to implement this. The current widget is certainly a big improvement over the earlier nonexistance of previews and solves a lot of problems. Extending it to do zooming would be of course very good, and I think that patches to implement this in a sane manner would be gladly accepted.

The "Preview in the Image Window" is harder. The same holds here: If somebody prepares a good patch it'd be accepted gladly.

I just want to make you aware that there are not that many people actively developing on the GIMP and there are certainly more pressing issues than the preview. Please don't hold your breath for improvements there.

Bye,
Simon

On Sun, Jul 03, 2005 at 11:38:45PM +0200, Pierre-Alexis wrote:

Hello,

I have a couple of thoughts that may (or may not) interest you :
- it's too bad that Gimp's filters' previews don't allow you to zoom in/out... it makes them almost useless in many cases ! it's sad too that some filters don't even have a preview...

one of the differences in the plug-ins and their previews is that some of the plug-ins have been written in c and have access to the parts of gimp that use previews. others have been scripted in either script-fu or python or perl (depending on if you have gimp-python and gimp-perl installed or not). the last time that i looked, scripts for gimp do not have access to previews.

- it's a little strange (but not serious) that filters previews are to be seen in a little preview windows, while other tools' previews (curves, hue-saturation, and so on...) are to be seen in the main window... it give a "non rigorous" feeling...

you can easily configure the size of the previews for the plug-ins that have previews. i wrote a how-to and a demonstration of how to do this on my web site:
http://carol.gimp.org/gimp2/basics/gui/gtk/gtkrc.html i created examples up to 576x576pixels. just because my examples stopped there does not mean that you need to.

What do you think of all this ? Does it read relevant to you ?

it makes sense what you are asking. the mishmash of different plug-ins and different behavior makes sense as well, if you can understand the gimp and its humble origins. it was in so many ways like a big community soup in which everyone brought something good and different and added it into the making. or perhaps like a pot luck dinner. at least this seems to describe the gimp-1.0 i started with.

i also can see what a huge effort it would be, coding-wise, to give preview access to gimp scripters. it might be a case on my part of a little knowledge is a bad thing, but i understand it enough to see how complicated it would be.

it is also (perhaps) difficult to see the humble origins right now from such a beautiful piece of software. this was the goal, but remember, looks can be deceiving and probably that is the intention of "looks" -- to be deceiving.

i hope the configuration how-to is helpful to you.

carol

Hi!

Simon and Carol had already said what there is to say.

I am only writing this to explain why there are "full image" previews: the things that do full image previews, in the layers->colors menu are implemented as native gimp tools (just like the paint brush). While most of the things that display small previews are plug-ins- external programs to the GIMP.

Regards, joao

On Mon, Jul 04, 2005 at 03:08:14PM -0400, michael chang wrote:

On 7/3/05, Carol Spears wrote:

i also can see what a huge effort it would be, coding-wise, to give preview access to gimp scripters. it might be a case on my part of a little knowledge is a bad thing, but i understand it enough to see how complicated it would be.

I'm assuming that this means it wouldn't be feisable to give a script the current parameters, take the returned image [unfortunately, this means it only works for scripts that return an image/drawable thingie], clip it, and display it in a window (or subset of one), in the settings window? [Of course, this is _HORRIBLY_ inefficient, but by my understanding it should be semi-feisable...]

the previews are interactive somehow. the scripts get loaded, the parameters set and then they run.

i was talking with one of the people working on gimp-python and maybe previews for the scripts are more reasonable than i made it sound.

But yes, The GIMP is understaffed IIRC, and this sounds hard to implement. Wasn't the whole point of Open Source that if you found a problem, the idea was to go in and fix it yourself? [Although I can see why that could be a problem for end-users...]

there does seem to be more free software being provided by people who are paid to provide it lately. it is interesting and i find it difficult to understand.

the very weird thing about this phenomena is that the paycheck would come with along with the access to the project. i know that at least in my life, the amount in the paycheck had nothing to do with the love of the work or the people i was working for and with.

carol

Hi,

Carol Spears writes:

i was talking with one of the people working on gimp-python and maybe previews for the scripts are more reasonable than i made it sound.

Scripts written using the Python bindings can actually be considered plug-ins. Since there's a pretty much complete Python GTK+ binding, a Python script for GIMP can use pretty much all of GTK+ so it could very well have a preview in it's dialog. If the pygimp binding would provide access to all widgets in libgimpwidgets and libgimpui, a Python "script" wouldn't have to appear any different than a C plug-in.

Sven