On 17 Apr 2002, at 8:55, Jacobs, Tim W wrote:

I wondering about the feasibility of translating PhotoShop action files into scripts for GIMP. I've already written a parser for PhotoShop 6.0 action files using the Adobe Photoshop 6.0 file formats specification (don't have the spec for earlier versions) but don't know how to interpret what I get out. Can anyone give me any pointers?

I am not a programmer, so I may be talking nonsense here. If I understand it correctly, the next step would be to translate your parser output to calls to the GIMP's Procedural Data Base.

I guess the easiest way to do that would be to store the output of your program as a script-fu script.

The big problem seems to be (to me) matching Photoshop functionality with GIMP functionality.

On Fri, Apr 19, 2002 at 03:17:35AM +0200, Branko Collin wrote:

I guess the easiest way to do that would be to store the output of your program as a script-fu script.

Or Perl-Fu -- I'd guess most people are slightly more comfortable writing Perl than Scheme...

/* Steinar */

On Fri, 19 Apr 2002 13:00:29 +0200, "Steinar H. Gunderson" wrote:

On Fri, Apr 19, 2002 at 03:17:35AM +0200, Branko Collin wrote:

I guess the easiest way to do that would be to store the output of your program as a script-fu script.

Or Perl-Fu -- I'd guess most people are slightly more comfortable writing Perl than Scheme...

But that would only work for a minority of GIMP users. Nowadays, for better or worse, the majority of GIMP users seem to be Windows users (in contrast with the developers, who are almost exclusively Linux users or UN*X users). And getting Gimp-Perl to work under Windows is not a trivial task (this can also be a problem on several other non-Linux systems), so it is easier for most people to use Script-Fu because it works "out of the box" on all systems.

Besides, for someone who is not a programmer and does not know anything about Perl and Scheme, I do not think that there is a big difference in the learning curve. Some people may be more comfortable writing Perl than Scheme, but that's usually because they already know Perl or a similar language, not because Perl is easier to learn. That being said, the Scheme implementation used for Script-Fu is far from perfect and not easy to debug, so that could be a good reason for some people to use Perl (as long as they are using Linux).

-Raphaël

On 19 Apr 2002, at 13:30, Raphaël Quinet wrote:

On Fri, 19 Apr 2002 13:00:29 +0200, "Steinar H. Gunderson" wrote:

On Fri, Apr 19, 2002 at 03:17:35AM +0200, Branko Collin wrote:

I guess the easiest way to do that would be to store the output of
your program as a script-fu script.

Or Perl-Fu -- I'd guess most people are slightly more comfortable writing Perl than Scheme...

Yes, but computers should be equally comfortable with either language, and:

But that would only work for a minority of GIMP users. Nowadays, for better or worse, the majority of GIMP users seem to be Windows users (in contrast with the developers, who are almost exclusively Linux users or UN*X users). And getting Gimp-Perl to work under Windows is not a trivial task (this can also be a problem on several other non-Linux systems), so it is easier for most people to use Script-Fu because it works "out of the box" on all systems.

Besides, for someone who is not a programmer and does not know anything about Perl and Scheme, I do not think that there is a big difference in the learning curve.

For somebody who has never programmed in his/her life, a logical language is probably just as easy, if not easier. How many problems in life reduce easily to a shopping list?

(Please reply to the OP also, who, as he mentioned, does not subscribe to this list.)

On Fri, Apr 19, 2002 at 02:18:41PM +0200, Branko Collin wrote:

For somebody who has never programmed in his/her life, a logical language is probably just as easy, if not easier. How many problems

The scheme dialect used in gimp is neither a "logical language", nor a real (strict) functional language, nor type-safe....

It does, however, run under windows, unlike gimp-perl, which should be very easy to port without Gtk. Porting Gtk should be easy too, if the destination is named cygwin.

Unfortunately, the developers who do the windows port don't use the same config mechanisms as under unix/cygwin, and Gtk is proven to be hard to port to that environment.

So an automatic translation to script-fu would be the most portable choice, since users don't care for the implementation.

pcg@goof.com ( Marc) (A.) (Lehmann ) writes: > Unfortunately, the developers who do the windows port don't use the same > config mechanisms as under unix/cygwin,

Actually, I do. (Hans doesn't.)

> and Gtk is proven to be hard to port to that environment.

... but I still fear that porting gimp-perl might be quite a task.

--tml

On 19 Apr 2002, at 13:30, Raphaël Quinet wrote:

Nowadays [...] the majority of GIMP users seem to be Windows users (in contrast with the developers, who are almost exclusively Linux users or UN*X users).

This statement stuck in my mind for some reason. Where do you base your user estimate on? Number of downloads?

On Sun, 21 Apr 2002 01:15:15 +0200, "Branko Collin" wrote:

On 19 Apr 2002, at 13:30, Raphaël Quinet wrote:

Nowadays [...] the majority of GIMP users seem to be Windows users (in contrast with the developers, who are almost exclusively Linux users or UN*X users).

This statement stuck in my mind for some reason. Where do you base your user estimate on? Number of downloads?

No, this is just a guess based on the number of questions, bug reports and discussions that I see in various places (mailing lists, newsgroups, web sites in English and in French). Nothing scientific, no statistics, no real facts. Just a guess.

-Raphaël

On Fri, Apr 19, 2002 at 10:34:19PM +0300, Tor Lillqvist wrote:

and Gtk is proven to be hard to port to that environment.

... but I still fear that porting gimp-perl might be quite a task.

Why? I apart from trivial changes (gimp-perl has to parse the output of gimptool -n --install-admin-bin because gimptool doesn't have an option to output the pluginpath and can't be edited under windows), it compiled out of the box five minutes ago under windows 2000 using cygwin and the binaries from www.gimp.org/win32 (which, as I read it, are not really compatible with my environment anyways).

I think the remaining problems are highly trivial (e.g. possible reliance on / instead of \, which mostly isn't a problem under windows anyways, socket functions etc.)

It's just that this has to do somebody who knows windows better then me (I lack the time & compiler to compile gimp &c for windows just to test it).