Hi,

Jimmac and Tigert drew some very nice mockups for the File-New dialog:

 http://jimmac.musichall.cz/stuff/new_image_simple.png
 http://jimmac.musichall.cz/stuff/new_image_expanded.png

I have implemented this in my local tree now. Here's a screenshot of
the expanded version:

  http://sven.gimp.org/gimp-new-image-dialog-2.png

This MNG file shows both expanded and collapsed states:

  http://sven.gimp.org/gimp-new-image-dialog-2.mng

Most of you will probably agree that this is a change to the
better. However this change is more drastic as one might think at
first. We always assign a unit to an image and at the moment this unit
cannot be "Pixels", it needs to be a real unit. With the new dialog
layout, the unit menu needs to contain Pixels or it would not be
possible to easily create an image of a certain pixel size. Now what
unit should be set on the image then?

My first idea was to set the unit from the resolution entry. That
sortof works but it's hard to understand where the Inches come from
when "Dot for Dot" is toggled off for the image display.

Feedback from users has shown that the way we treat units currently is
hard to understand. People keep asking for ways to get lengths
displayed in the choosen image unit. It's not intuitive that this
relates to the "Dot for Dot" setting of the image view. Below I am
proposing a couple of changes to make this easier and I'd like to get
some comments on this.

- Allow pixels as image unit. We will probably have to hide this new
  behaviour in the PDB because plug-ins might not expect to get
  "pixels" returned when they ask for the image's unit. We could use
  the resolution unit as a fallback for this. A new PDB function
  should then be added that maps the core behaviour.

- Change the behaviour of the image display "Dot for Dot" mode.
  Instead of showing pixels when "Dot for Dot" is on and the image
  unit when it is toggled off, do always show the image unit in the
  rulers and in the statusbar. If the image unit is pixels, toggling
  dot-for-dot will not have any effect, we can gray out the menu entry
  then. For images with unit != pixels, dot-for-dot will only affect
  how the image is displayed, not what units are shown.

- Add an easy way to change the image's unit. It's quite well hidden
  in the Image Scale dialog right now. With the changes proposed
  above, changing the image unit could become a more frequent task, so
  it should be easily accessible.

I am not yet sure what parts of the core will break if we do these
changes. Perhaps it's a bad idea to start with. Please comment.


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