On 12/15/2010 09:21 PM, Lambertus wrote: >> Hello David and thank you for the quick reply! >> Now, using the word "Canvas" rather than "Drawable area" makes things a lot >> more sane immediately, and your >> explanation is accurate and acceptable. > Maybe this is the same situation I have. > > I have a picture (picture 1). > I expand the size of the canvas to make room to copy another picture beside > the original (picture 2). > Picture 2 is copied from an open GIMP image and pasted into the enlarged > canvas area of picture 1. > Picture 2 is invisible if it dragged outside the bounds of picture 1 into an > open area of the canvas. That's because even though the canvas got bigger, the layer didn't. If something is pasted into a layer and all or part of it is outside the boundaries of the layer it's not visible and if you anchor the paste, the part outside of the layer will be lost forever. We say that it clips to the layer. (If this happens type <CTRL>Z a time or two right away to undo. You can make the layer bigger in the layer menu, and then you won't drag things into invisibility. New layers will default to a bigger canvas size. It all seems completely obvious to me now, but I remember losing things like this and being really frustrated and not knowing what to do.
So we agree that it's REALLY confusing and frustrating, so why DON'T layers resize with the canvas? The reason that the layer/layers don't automatically resize to the canvas size is because there's no way for GIMP to know if you want to do that. You can have a lot of layers of different sizes all over the canvas overlapping or not. Imagine a late Mondrian work. Some layers might be canvas size, but some might be tiny. Some layers might be opaque, and some more or less transparent. That might be an important part of your design. If you then realize your canvas needs to be a little bigger and resize it, and then find that all of the layers resized to the new size of the canvas, well that would be horrifying. If that's what you want though, you can make any layer go to the layer size by first making sure the layer is active in the layers dialog, then going into the layer menu and selecting the "layer to image size" menu item. You also can just right click the layer in the layers dialog and select the "layer to image size" menu item. Patrick _______________________________________________ Gimp-user mailing list Gimp-user@lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU https://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gimp-user