Re: [Gimp-developer] paper sizes [request for comments]
On Fri, 8 Jun 2001, Austin Donnelly wrote: > But, we're talking about *paper* here. A4 for me is the same size as > A4 for another user, surely? There are only a limited number of paper > sizes in existence, and they should all be available system-wide. That's not true. Users have things like "that fancy letter paper that I buy at Flammarion", which have weird sizes. They have stickers, envelopes, and other things on which they want to draw logos. The paradigm could also encompass screen dimensions, like "16x16 icon" or "advertisement bar at top of MyStartup.com". In the future: We could also add things such as background color of the paper, or a default letterhead - the user could then place his or her drawing according to the background color or letterhead. Why then do we have a per-user unitrc? David Monniauxhttp://www.di.ens.fr/~monniaux Laboratoire d'informatique de l'École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France ___ Gimp-developer mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer
Re: [Gimp-developer] Re: UI remarks
On Fri, 8 Jun 2001, Guillermo S. Romero / Familia Romero wrote: > Last time I tried XF4 (3.3.6 now, it was just a test) the logs shown > the monitor size fine. It works if your card and monitor can talk DDC. > Maybe some daily users of XF4 could report what is going now. It seems to me (XF 4.1.0) that XFree86 gets the size of the monitor but does not set the dpi according to it. A system-dependent workaround is to grep the information in the X logs. David Monniaux http://www.di.ens.fr/~monniaux Laboratoire d'informatique de l'École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France ___ Gimp-developer mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer
Re: [Gimp-developer] paper sizes [request for comments]
I've been trying to contact libpaper's author, but to no avail so far. libpaper is old (1996) and does not offer per-user paper formats. Furthermore it does not allow interactive modifications. I think we should do something ourselves (maybe being compatible with libpaper for /etc/papersize). I don't know what file format to use: an obvious choice would be something like paper_name L H but what about extensions (such as paper background color)? Any comments ? -- David Monniauxhttp://www.di.ens.fr/~monniaux Laboratoire d'informatique de l'École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France ___ Gimp-developer mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer
Re: [Gimp-developer] defaults for tile cache, swap, etc. (was Re:UI remarks)
On Thu, 7 Jun 2001, Roel Schroeven wrote: > > --- Raphael Quinet <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Wed, 06 Jun 2001, Guillermo S. Romero / Familia Romero wrote: > > > In some cases, IIRC, /tmp is RAM. > This issue comes up from time to time, I've seen it on Ask Slashdot too. > But /tmp in RAM is bad. If you're writing/reading relatively small amounts > of data to/from /tmp, the data is cached anyway. If /tmp is in RAM, it Here's my 0.02 Euro (feel free to correct errors). /tmp in RAM surely refers to Solaris. On Solaris, /tmp is actually implemented as pages taken from RAM+swap - this is no problem since it is supposed to be erased on reboot. Unless Solaris is very stupid, there is actually no duplication between the filesystem and the cache, since the filesystem is actually in the cache! /var/tmp is a normal disk-based filesystem. David Monniauxhttp://www.di.ens.fr/~monniaux Laboratoire d'informatique de l'École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France ___ Gimp-developer mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer
Re: [Gimp-developer] UI Stuff
On Wed, 6 Jun 2001, Hans Breuer wrote: > What do you suggest? Stopping the distribution of gtk/win32 apps ?? Maybe add an explicit message in the installer that the Win32 version is highly experimental compared to the Linux version. > And as a reply to your next mail: If I would want my mom use > The Gimp, I would have run the installation for her, so all > the optimizations for the one time used appears rather wasted > to me. I don't see your point. Yes, I did install Gimp for my mother. So? The point is that not everybody has a "computer wizard" on hand just to install a graphics program one wants to test. Gimp is some kind of flagship for "free software for the end user", so it would be nice to have it installable by the end user. Anyway, it's my 0.02 euro. Don't take it as inflammatory! :-( David Monniauxhttp://www.di.ens.fr/~monniaux Laboratoire d'informatique de l'École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France ___ Gimp-developer mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer
[Gimp-developer] paper sizes [request for comments]
I think of coding something for paper sizes. That's what I propose: - a set of predefined paper sizes (ISO and US) - user-definable sizes - the default paper size is set according to the locale (country) where the user is. Any comments? How to do this cleanly? -- David Monniauxhttp://www.di.ens.fr/~monniaux Laboratoire d'informatique de l'École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France ___ Gimp-developer mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer
[Gimp-developer] UI remarks
Dear fellow developers, Here are a few observations of mine on the UI, following Chris' mom's observation that Gimp "looks terrible". We should keep in mind that in people's ideas, Free Software is mixed with "Freeware", i.e. small amateurish programs, often shoddily put together - maybe good for gadgets, but not for any serious work. We should dispel that false impression by conveying a good impression making the user comfortable. Here are a few remarks, for which I request comments. I do not want to be inflammatory! The installation process is frightening: 1. The user is presented with a dialog box "Welcome to GIMP" that is half full of legalese (NO GUARANTEE etc...). Perhaps the first installer screen should simply state that Gimp is a painting, touch up etc... program able to read various image formats etc..., and the legalese should be pushed to a second dialog box ? Maybe some small picture displaying a stunning example of Gimp work would be nice of the first box. This could be the occasion of explaining briefly, in this second dialog box, the interest of free software. 2. The current second dialog box shows a full list of files and directories that most users will never care about at first. Maybe we should add an indication that knowing all about this is not necessary to use Gimp? A program that seems to require knowing the function of about 20 files to be used does not look user-friendly indeed. [Disclaimer: I do not say that you need to know what unitrc is about to run Gimp. I just say that this dialog box may make unsuspecting users think so.] 3. The installer runs a script that copies files and asks the user to spot an error in the execution of the scriptx and investiguate in case there is an error. [even worse in the Windows version] Come on. Users do not know about scripts, and they do not know what an error looks like [*]. The installation process should see by itself if an error has happened, and display a meaningful error message in that case. Furthermore, asking to investiguate an error even though no error has happened reinforces the prejudice that Gimp is "amateur work" that breaks often. 4. Adjustment of parameters Another frightening dialog box. We should really convey the idea that the default settings are OK, and that those settings can be changed at any time afterwards (otherwise the users may spend time pondering what to say here). a) The default tile cache size should be adjusted with respect to the installed RAM size. This should fulfill the need of most users (PCs with one console user). In the case of multi-user systems, the system administrator should be able to set other default values (maybe depending on the machine). Many people just leave the default of 32M, open a big image and claim that Gimp is s much slower than PhotoShop. If those people knew better, they'd heard their hard drive churning and understand that Gimp is swapping, but this should not be expected from most users - how do you think that computer resellers sold boxes with fast CPUs and only 32M of RAM ? Furthermore, we should add the precision that the value there should not be the total amount of RAM in the machine, but the size of the portion of that full RAM that should be used for Gimp images. b) The setting of the swap file in .gimp-x.y/tmp is a problem on NFS-mounted accounts (universities, for instance). Why not /tmp by default? 5. The resolution thing is OK. Now for the main UI. We should have a way to remind people to use the RIGHT BUTTON on the image. I bet many people think Gimp is some kind of small MS Paint-like program because they have never been able to reach the filters. Yes, I know this is the second tip, but... -- David Monniauxhttp://www.di.ens.fr/~monniaux Laboratoire d'informatique de l'École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France ___ Gimp-developer mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer
Re: [Gimp-developer] UI Stuff
On 5 Jun 2001, Sven Neumann wrote: > He's speaking of the Win32 version here which of course looks and feels > different than the usual win32 application. This feeling will change as Let's add that the UI in the Win32 version is *BUGGY* (my mom runs it and there are some ugly glitches - and I'm not talking of the screwed-up support for tablets). So we should not take as "inadequate UI" what is actually bugs, pure and simple. We should be very careful with the Win32 version since it may easily convey the wrong impression that Gimp, and free software in general, is buggy. -- David ___ Gimp-developer mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer
[Gimp-developer] shrunk display
I would like to know the precise functions that handle the shrinking of the image for display. I would like to code them in MMX. [The current Gimp core code is too much of a mess!] David Monniauxhttp://www.di.ens.fr/~monniaux Laboratoire d'informatique de l'École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France ___ Gimp-developer mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer
