Hello, fellow gimpers!

I am relatively new to GIMP - about one year of experience and still learning something new almost every day. Being hooked to it from day one, my respect to all the developers and contributors has been growing up ever since. I am probably one of millions of grateful users holding my breath in anticipation of full GIMP GEGL integration, porting it to GTK3 and being on the receiving end of subsequent benefits in this leap type of development.
I also realize (as far as my knowledge base allows me) the challenges and intricacies the developers facing in this endeavor. For all that and trying to make GIMP even a better tool, my sincere thanks! Couple of questions here.
I made animated splashes for GIMP and showed them to my 10 yr old nephew some time ago.
He liked the idea so much that we went on in exploring GIMP animation capabilities.
Making GIF animations in GIMP isn't exactly straightforward and easy thing to do, especially HQ animations.
Not to mention you have to install at least a dozen of other plugins to increase productivity rate and to make the quality/amount-of-effort-spent ratio more or less adequate.
On top of it - GIF's limited color depth. GAP was somewhat painful but nonetheless positive experience, and now it seems to be abandoned by its developer for good. We can hardly make any use of it in 2.8 version. Given shrank animation choices in GIMP we turned to apng and flash.

Question 1. Why apng isn't an officially supported file format? I'm aware of its applicability limitations in terms of web-site, browser and image editing software support and the fact that some third party scripts and plugins rely on standart libpng-png. The former can change any day and the latter is fixable (well, it didn't take a whole lot of Einstein from me to figure out how and I am not a programmer).
I suspect GIMP main architects are wary of linpng-apng patch and its reliability. But why? The Mozilla team did it. Opera. XnView did it. The list goes on.
Are there any other reasons? I've been using APNG plugin for a while, its back-compatibility with PNGs and overall reliability are beyond reproach. No problems whatsoever.

Question 2. GIMP supports animated GIFs as its splash image. It doesn't increase start-up time a bit, no matter how heavy GIF files I'm using (yes, I timed it!)
I want to try and make it work with apng. When I use animated png as a splash image, however, GIMP decodes and displays only it's first frame.
It happens despite file-png and libpng having been removed from plugins folder and replaced by patched ones. What particular plugin(s) is responsible for program's start-up and opening image inside a splash?
I've tried to locate it, but there are so many! And it seems like a chain of commands is being called at start-up. Hope somebody steer me in the right direction.
Thank you all in advance!
Nikita O.
Никита Омуль
P.S. I am neither a programmer nor a professional artist. Just an average gimper. So, please, treat me as such ;) Cheers!

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Alexandre Prokoudine wrote

On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 11:53 AM, Nik Omul wrote:

But it isn't :) Most recently Wolfgang added GUI for the exact align transformation plugin. He just lacks the time to adjust the code for 2.8 (actually, I was going to have a go at it, but never found the time either) and do a release.

That is a good news. Thanks, Alexandre.

Dima Ursu wrote

Никита Омуль - haha, funny thing. This in Romanian will sound in english like this : Nikita "The man" ; Are you from Moldova, or something?

No relation to Moldova. Омуль in Russian is a name for Baltic Whitefish subspecies endemic to Baikal Lake in Siberia. That is where my ancestry tracks back to early 19th century. But I like Nikita "The Man" )))

Ragnar Brynjúlfsson wrote

Why not use mng instead of apng. mng is, as far as I know, officially supported by libpng and doesn't require any patching. They basically do the same thing, just in a slightly different way.

Joao S. O. Bueno Calligaris wrote

On 15 August 2012 10:17, Ragnar Brynjúlfsson <ragtag@> wrote: (In a realted note: I just saw that my system's ImageMagick does support .mng and does not support .apng - I was about to suggest Nik a workflow consisting of creating .mng's in GIMP and
converting them to .apng with ImageMagick in the meantime)

js ->

According to publications MNG is more bulky and considered less perspective. APNG was actually meant to be more promising substitution to MNG. I've never tried MNG, though, first of all because APNG plugin with patched libpng work just fine.
The only problem I've ever had with it is mentioned in my Q2. Well, to get it to work in GIMP I had to remove file-png and libpng outside plugins folder
and make some changes to 3rd plugins that rely on libpng, because opening or saving apng files ignores file-apng when file-png is still in there (which is understandable).

drawoc wrote

The loading dialog needs to be shown while the plugins are being loaded, so the dialog can't use any of the plugins to display those images.

I believe the loading dialog uses the image loaders from gdk-pixbuf (which is a library that GTK+ depends on). If you wanted to add apng support to the dialog, you'd need to add support there instead. (There might already be apng loaders for gdk-pixbuf somewhere out there, I haven't checked)

-- drawoc

This could be it. I should have taken this into account. Will take a look at GTK libraries as well when I got a minute. Thanks for pointing this out.

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