On Sat, Jun 14, 2008 at 4:29 PM, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The basic idea is to forbid 'Save' to PNG here.
Which of course would be stupid, since PNG is a perfectly valid information-loss-free choice in many cases, same with many other data formats. Not every work includes dozens of layers and stuff, many image manipulation happen without any of that and thus is perfectly save in almost any format, introducing a forced export would we very cumbersome and non-intuitive. To sum some of my thoughts things up: The export file dialog is currently a bit confusing, since the meaning of 'Ignore' isn't obvious. I think "Ignore" should either be renamed to "Save Current Layer" or removed and the same functionality offered via a menu entry "File/Save Current Layer". I found "File/Save As Copy" a little confusing at first, since its not obvious how it differs from a plain "Save", in its functionality it is similar to what other applications offer as "Export", except that it doesn't restrict the exported format, which is a good thing, since I always found it annoying to be forced to switch to another dialog just because I wanted to save in a different format. So while not obvious at first, it does what the name says, is used in other Gnome apps and doesn't cause any damage when used instead of "Save". So leave it as is. When it comes to information loss due to compression as with JPEGs a reorder/rename/change of the File menu functions won't help. The user simply needs to learn what a JPEG does, something that could be easily done for example with a better JPEG export dialog that gives a preview of the current quality setting. xcf file ending is a non-intuitive, it is not obvious that this is the native Gimp for format. It is already listed at the top in the file format box, maybe it could be made even clearer, for example by inserting a separator between the native formats and the non-native ones. "Gimp xcf image" could be renamed to something more obvious "Native Gimp image" or something like that to make it clearer that it is the 'real thing' instead of just an export format. There already is a nag-screen informing the user of what he is going to do, so I don't see any real danger of information loss. A way to perfamently hide the nag screen however might be nice. A useful addition to Gimp would be an auto-save. Not only could it be used to periodically save the image to prevent data loss in case of crashes, it could also be used to store .xcf files for exported files automatically, when opening such an exported file Gimp could then offer an option to recover the original .xcf data from the auto-save. Overall I really don't see a need to completly revamp Gimps Export/Save interface, the current one is working quite well, a bit polish here and there can't hurd, but the overall workflow is quite ok. -- WWW: http://pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/ Blog: http://grumbel.blogspot.com/ JabberID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ICQ: 59461927 _______________________________________________ Gimp-developer mailing list Gimp-developer@lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU https://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer
