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GIMP News

May 2

Tip O' The Day
The checkerboard pattern you may see on your images indicates an area where all layers are transparent or hidden. It isn't any "real" image data; you can't Blur the checkerboard, for example.

May 1

New Versions of SunRaster, XWD, And PostScript/PDF Loaders
Peter Kirchgessner has released new versions of his plugins for loading several file formats. All the updated files are available to download from AOL, and soon, the registry.

Gtk List Starts Up
Well, it's here! gtk-list@redhat.com is a new discussion list for non-GIMP related Gtk discussion. To subscribe, send mail to gtk-list-request@redhat.com with the word subscribe in the subject.

Preliminary SGML DTD Started
Sami Lempinen (sp?) has begun work on a DTD for writing GIMP documentation, based on the the DocBook DTD. While Sami seems like he knows his stuff, I'm sure contributions of technical expertise are always welcome.

April 30

New GIMP To Have Guides, "Snap To Guide" Options
From sources very close to GIMP comes news that the newest beta will include support for guides. Guides are horizontal or vertical alignment aids that allow you to precisely place elements. They've been present in DTP software (like Pagemaker) for ages, and are a new feature in Photoshop 4.0

You will be able to drag and drop guides, undo/redo guide placement, and even save guide settings in XCF files. When you save to other image formats, the guides are not visible.

Perhaps most useful is the fact that while dragging selections, they'll snap to the guide when in proximity to it. Spencer, Peter, have I told you lately that I love you? :)

New Gradient Editor
There's a new version of the Gradient Editor out. It fixes a few bugs involving uninitialized variables, and it prevents a few goofs when you have some gradient dialogs open. It's available exclusively (woo woo) on the gimp news file archive.

(This isn't because Quartic have signed an exclusive multi-year distribution agreement. It's actually because Quartic's having some network troubles.)

New Gtk List Soon...
otto@redhat.com has volunteered to start hosting a Gtk mailing list. This would be for people developing applications and widgets with Gtk, but not specifically for or related to GIMP.

Stay tuned for the actual list creation, which should be in a day or so.

April 29

Layers Tutorial
I've just created a very basic introduction to some simple layer operations. It isn't much use to you layer veterans, but if you scratch your head when someone talks about duplicating layers, check out my layers tutorial.

Quartic's New Stuff
Quartic has been a busy guy lately. He's created a modification to the blend functions in GIMP that uses an anti-aliased adaptive supersampling blend. It really, really rocks. You can grab his replacement files from my local mirror here at gimp news.

Here is Quartic's full announcement.

I have just finished implementing antialiased blends. These are made by using an adaptive supersampling algorithm (just like POV-Ray).

There are two new source files, asupsample.h and asupsample.h. These form a very small and generic library to do adaptive, non-jittered supersampling. Someone may find it useful for plug-ins.

This tar file contains blend.c and asupsample.{c,h}. You'll have to add the necessary information to app/Makefile.

I know you'll hate me for this, but again all the scripts will have to be modified :-) This is to let the blend tool know about whether you want to supersample or not, and to tell it about the maximum subdivision depth and antialiasing threshold you want to use (the default values in the dialog box, 3 and 0.2 respectively, work fine for most situations).

Some points to note: good threshold values are around [0.05, 0.4]. There is not much sense in using more than 5 subdivision levels, as the contribution of samples begins to get too small to be noticeable. A threshold value of 0.0 will cause *all* pixels to be supersampled to the max subdivision depth (i.e. it will be slow).

April 28

Quartic's New Stuff
Quartic has put a few new things together.

These are all available from Everybody Loves the GIMP.

I Am Caught Totally Off Guard
also known as

Going Away For The Weekend Is Bad For News Pages
also known as

GIMP 0.99.9 Released!
Many things have happened this weekend, and I wasn't here to chronicle them. First and foremost among them, GIMP 0.99.9 is available from Berkeley and my local mini-mirror.

I'm not sure what news has been obsoleted by this new release. I'll try to find out for you today. Sorry!

April 26

At Least One Person Found To Be Paying Attention
Special thanks to Blaise Camp, the first person to mail me about my embarrassing failure to close my <UL>. :)

I'm In Boston Right Now
Well, I've got a whole passel of news to report, but unfortunately I've only got a few seconds to even write these words. Rest assured that when I return home (Sunday night EST) I'll have tidbits about the following:

Stay tuned, faithful readers! :)

April 25

New Plugin: Blinds
Andy Thomas has written a plugin called Blinds that has been uploaded to the GIMP Plugin Registry. The blurb there says this:

If you imagine your image pasted on a window blind (either vertical or horizontal) and then the blinds are opened and closed this is the general effect you get.

PSD Loader: It's Not Dead
Adam D. Moss reports slow but steady progress on the PSD-format image loader. He mentioned that while Torsten's code was fairly complete, adding layer capabilities have tripled the size of the plugin. "It's not that it's too difficult, it's just it's very time consuming," he said, "And I don't have very much time. Still, it's moving..."

IfsCompose 0.6
Owen Taylor has released an update of his plugin for interactively creating fractals, IfsCompose. Here's a snippet of his announcement:

The changes from 0.5 are mainly in the user interface - I've tried to make it more intuitive and more consistent with the GIMP. (There's no more "Drag with the right button to move, with the middle button to distort, and with your left foot to change color." Apologies to anyone who got used to that system.)

He has the program as well as a tutorial available at the IfsCompose homepage.

April 24

Pat, Brush, and Script Archive Started
Talk about good service :). Jens Lautenbacher has started an archive for pats, brushes, and scripts. There's not much there as I write this, but his site looks like a very cool place to stay tuned to.

Whirl And Pinch 2.06
Quartic has released a new version of Whirl and Pinch that fixes a problem with crashing when given very small selections. You can get the new versions from Everybody Loves The GIMP.

April 23

Icon I Made
I just put together this icon that I use in my application launcher (Wharf) to represent GIMP. Feel free to use it if you like it. For a collection of other GIMP icons, see Mike Schaeffer's GIMP icon page.

Note: Click on the inline GIF to download an XPM version of the icon.

New Version Of PCX Loader
Bit has just put out a new version (0.8) of his PCX loader. He has this to say about it:

Not a great change, but saving works. [...] At least I could read the images from xv, corel, paintbrush, vpic, etc...

You can download the PCX loader from Bit's GIMP Page.

Miscellaneous Stuff
Well, there's not much news today. Here are a few random things to take a look at while you're waiting for news.

Cooltype has a lot of tips, tricks, and other magic for Photoshop. While not 100% interface compatible, 0.99.x has virtually all the capabilities of Photoshop and these tips translate rather well. Check them out.

April 22

New Pattern
I'm almost embarrassed to write about this, but I couldn't really find any more appropriate place. I've created a subdirectory in my files section for putting interesting patterns that I've created or been given. I may do this for Script-Fu scripts as well.

To be honest, I'm not particularly interested in becoming the curator for all such things. I think someone with a little time and some web space could make quite an interesting site collecting things like pats, scripts, and brushes (Quartic has already started saving gradients). Any volunteers?

Gradients Dominate Today's News
Well, I hate to dwell on a single subject too long, but these gradients are just too good to ignore. I tweaked the gimp news logo as a result of some toying around with gradients. I also created a quick doodle of some of the neat things you can do with them.

Gradients. Learn them. Love them. Live them.

More Gradients Available
Adrian Likins has added a few new gradients to Quartic's initial collection.

New Gradient Editor Version
Wow. Quartic has truly made a powerful tool with his gradient editor. Check out all the cool gradients (and the new version of the editor) at his new Gradient Editor homepage. I think the "Cold Steel" gradient is my favorite :).

April 21

New gimp news Logo Debut
For fun, I decided to create a new banner logo for gimp news. Hope you like it.

Inside Word On New GIMP: "Bugfixes"
When confronted with the burning question "What's new?", sources close to core GIMP development have said simply this: "Bugfixes." I leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine just what this means.

(Can you tell there's not a whole lot of news today?)

Adam D. Moss Writes ZealousCrop
Adam has created an interesting plugin called ZealousCrop. Says Adam:

The function it performs is basically a very zealous autocrop, which will not only remove solid space from the sides of the image, but also unused rows and columns from all over the picture. Try it with a sparse picture to see the results.
Version 1.00 is available here for download from gimp news.

Patches Page Becomes Independent
Well, I've decided (for now) not to update this page with every patch. Instead, if you're looking for patches, just see the patch page. I found it to be pretty redundant to post a patch announcement here and on the patch page.

Informal survey: do you want to see patch announcements appear here still? Would you never browse the patches if I didn't announce them here first? Tell me.

Fixed Gradient Editor Available
Quartic has released an updated version of his gradient editor that now allows you to actually close the dialog :). Fetch it from Everybody Loves the GIMP

April 19

New Patches Posted
I've put up three new patches that fix a buglet in plasma and a couple of Gtk bugs.

April 18

Offset Patch From Peter
There's been YAOP (Yet Another Offset Patch). This one is the one you should use, though.

Weekend Looms
I am not going to be home this weekend, and as a result, you may not see regular updates to the news page here. However, I will have some sort of remote access, so I'll do my best. In the meantime, happy GIMPing with 0.99.8.

Patch to Offset
Adrian's original Offset patch made it into 0.99.8, but he has released a new patch that fixes a few things that were broken with the original.

New Clothify
drz has updated his clothify script to work with the new features of 0.99.8's Script-Fu. Grab it from drz's minimalist website.

Icon Info
A few people have asked me about the "Graphics by GIMP" icon I have in the lower right hand corner of this page. Feel free to steal it and put it on your page and link it to http://www.xcf.berkeley.edu/~gimp/. That's what I made it for.

If you make a cool little GIMP button, send it to me. Something along the lines of "Get GIMPED!" or "Are you a GIMP?" or something. :)

NEW GIMP! 0.99.8 Released
In the wee hours of dawn, the hardworking team of Mattis and Kimball slaved over a hot fileserver to bring you the latest and best version of GIMP. Download it from from XCF or the gimp news mirror. Note: I've had some trouble getting into XCF. Consider trying gimp news first. (Thanks go to Aspirin for sending me the tar files when I couldn't get to XCF!)

Note: As with all GIMP development releases, don't expect rock-solid, mission-critical performance, and don't expect a trouble free package. However, if you're up to a bit of fooling around with the newest pre-release, go for it. Don't say I didn't warn you.

April 17

New Plugin: Autocrop
drz has, at my urgent pleading, created a version of Autocrop for 0.99.x. Thanks drz! Autocrop takes a canvas and trims off the border color from it, similar to the NetPBM program pnmcrop. It's very handy.

Second IfsCompose Patch
Owen Taylor posted a second small patch to his IfsCompose plugin.

New Release Expected "Soon"
I just got the word from Spencer on IRC. It went something like this:

<xach> what's new?
<spencer> the carve script-fu script
<spencer> pete and I will probably be making another release soon
<spencer> there are tons of plug-ins which we have integrated

For a preview of carve in action, see pictures of it in action on the GIMP homepage. Note: It's not available quite yet, as it doesn't work right with 0.99.7.

Patch Page Started
I decided it would be a neat thing to collect the various patches that get posted to the mailing list and stick them on a page. If this proves too time-consuming, I'll have to stop, but for now, you can find it by clicking the patches link at the top of this page.

The first patch posted there is Quartic's IfsCompose patch, which makes it (in Quartic's words) very fast.

No News
There is a disturbing lack of GIMP news to report. So I thought I'd tell everyone that I'm going to be working on a new collection of 0.99.x tips that I tentatively call "The Basics", showing how to do elementary effects like drop shadows, engraved text, punched out text, and others using the tools that come with 0.99.x.

If you'd like to contribute tips, feel free. If you've written some tips, let me know so I can announce them.

April 16

"Trippy Circles" Tip
At long last I've created my first-ever 0.99.x tip. This one is for creating bizarre concentric circles that tile. You may or may not find it useful. I think it's neat...check it out.

IfsCompose Plugin
Owen Taylor has created a plugin that generates images from fractals. Here's his blurb about it:

IfsCompose allows the creation of Iterated Function System fractals by graphical manipulation of the component transforms. It's still a beta version, but allows the creation of some fairly neat graphics in its current state.

It's available from the Registry or from Owen's IfsCompose home page.

Ripple Plugin
A version of the ripple plugin is now available for 0.99.x, and is available from http://ieng9.ucsd.edu/~bdegenha/gimp/, along with Shift and Spread as well. Not sure if those are new, though.

Interface Design Tips
Apple has made their Human Interface Resources available on the net. This is a source of good tips if you're going to be designing plugin dialogs and things of that nature.

April 15

3d Stereograms For GIMP
Bit is in the process of porting a 3d stereogram plugin from version 0.54 to version 0.99.x. This plugin looks very cool if you can make your eyes do the Magic Eye trick :).

New GTK Snapshot Out
A more recent version of GTK has been uploaded. I'm not sure what the differences are from the one that comes with 0.99.7 are, though. It's available at ftp://ftp.xcf.berkeley.edu/pub/pmattis/.

Photoshop Filter Reference
The Photoshop Web Reference has an excellent section that documents the standard collection of filters that come with Photoshop 4.0 and gives examples of the filters applied to a reference image. This could be a good resource if you're looking for ideas for new plugins, or information on what a given Photoshop plugin does.

"Old" Spencer & Peter Interview
For those who didn't get a chance to see it, in my defunct GIMP Gazette I had an interesting interview with Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis. This was around the end of January, before GIMP 0.99.x came out.

Edge Detection Updates
Thorsten Schnier has made some updates to his Laplace and Sobel edge detection plugins. You can get them from his GIMP plugins page.

April 14

IRC Servers Part II
Ok. I know the gimp.net name resolution is a bit flaky. Alternate hostnames for irc[1-3].gimp.net are irc.mint.net, desmodus.biom.cornell.edu, and irc.canweb.net, respectively. The port numbers are the same.

Stupid Whirl and Pinch Tricks
I've put together a couple silly pictures produced with the immensely useful and powerful new Whirl and Pinch plugins. Perhaps they should be named "Quartic's Power Goo"...:)

Eric's Updated Page
Eric Hernes announced he's updated his home page. This is a very nice spot. He's got

listed there.

Whirl and Pinch 2.05 Released
Quartic has released a new version of his ultra-cool whirl and pinch plugins. Changes from 2.01 include taking advantage of the symmetric nature of the transformations and using a pre-calculated subsampled preview. I don't know exactly what that means :) but I imagine it almost gets you a realtime preview. Grab the new files from Everybody Loves the GIMP.

Adrian's Cool Stuff
Adrian has been hyperactive over the weekend, making a ton of cool stuff for GIMP. These things include:

The customizations made to Nova allow you to specify the number of "spokes" generated. He has also patched the Offset feature to allow you to easily offset the image by half its height and width (useful when making tileable patterns). You can get all this cool stuff from Adrian's Cool Stuff Page.

Rotation Map Concept
Aspirin just shared with me his idea about a Rotation Map plugin. The concept is cool:

<AspiBored> Yeah, imagine the displacement plugin, but instead of shifting image A by a displacement in image B, it rotates A by B. So, for example, to simulate the 'twirl' filter you'd do a radial gradient fill in image B from white in the middle to black on the outside.

PNG Plugin Ported
Well, someone beat Kaz to the punch. Daniel Skarda ported the 0.60 PNG loader to 0.99.x. He does mention in his mail that 

ps: I have not put this plug-in in new registry yet, mainly because:

  1) I do not know if someone with better understanding of gtk/libpng
internals is working on this plug-in too (I just rewrite some parts
of old plug-in to confirm new gimp API)

  2) I am not sure how to fill some parameters of gimp_install_procedure
(Who is author? - I think I am not - I just did port from 0.60 to 0.99.7...)

With that in mind, you can download it from Dan's ftp directory.

Netscape Palette for GIMP
Ben Boule put together a Netscape palette file for GIMP. This is helpful in developing Web-friendly images. To use it, copy it to ~/.gimp/palettes/ or another palette path. It will be available in the Palettes dialog.

GIMP Scanner Support (via SANE)
The SANE (Scanner Access Now Easy) project is dedicated to making a universal scanner support for Unix a reality. SANE can be used directly as a GIMP plugin, and the X interface is based on Gtk. More info is available from the SANE homepage. (Thanks Quartic).

New Projects
Just heard from Quartic on IRC that he's working on making Bumpmap 2.00 for 0.99.x, as well as Diffraction 1.00. With regards to diffraction:

<quartic> xach: I'm thinking of how to make it faster. Argh. It is not trivial :-(

On a related note, Kaz Sasayama has expressed an interest in making a new PNG loader for 0.99.x.

april 13

GIMP IRC Chat
Just wanted to let folks know again about the #gimp channel on Byxnet IRC. The servers are irc1.gimp.net:6666, irc2.gimp.net:6667, and irc3.gimp.net:6666. Some of the current regulars are me (Xach), bit, drz, Adrian, tomb, quartic, and Aspirin (sorry if I left someone out). We even talk about GIMP most of the time :).

GIMP Brush Loader
drz has been a busy scamp modifying the pat plugin to work with GIMP's brush file format. There is a gbr loader available at drz's GIMP files.

GIMP News Started
Well, I've decided that rather than try to overhaul my crusty old site, I'm gonna try a bit of a new direction in this news site. It's a bit less broad than my concept for the GIMP Gazette (which is officially in suspended development) right now.

Quake enthusiasts will no doubt note the similarity between my layout and Blue's News. The reason for that is simple: his layout is simple, elegant, and effective, and I like it quite a bit.

Much of the content of this site will no doubt be derived from the GIMP mailing lists, but also from IRC and other contributions as well. If you have any news you'd like to announce, post to gimp-announce or email me and I'll do it.

Whirl and Pinch Update
Quartic has released an updated version (2.01) of the Whirl and Pinch plugins that supports many new features. Peter says of the previews:

The previews in the new whirl and pinch plug-ins kick ass. All plug-ins which have dialogs need previews like those.

This sounds like pretty high praise to me :). You can grab them at Quartic's GIMP page, Everybody Loves the GIMP.

PCX Plugin
Francisco Bustamante (Bit on IRC) has written a PCX loader plugin. Grab it from the Registry or download it from Geocities.

Tim Newsome's Plugins
Tim Newsome (drz on IRC) has written a few new plugins. grid draws a set of grid lines on an image. pat loads and saves .pat pattern files. They're both available at drz's spartan web presence.

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