On Mon, 31 Jan 2005 14:17:37 -0200, Joao S. O. Bueno Calligaris
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> I went to the site, and did not find easily a description of what the 
> plug-ins do (althoug I am in a hurry). Can you give us a url?

http://www.ximba.org/gfxmuse/gfxmuse.html

Links to the download page, wiki, etc. are in the upper right corner.  I
tested the web site design under Firefox and IE (don't remember which
version, but it was on WinXP).  It might have problems rendering
correctly under other browsers, though I tried to make it W3C compliant
to some extent (probably got a few pages still to debug).  

The plug-in most asked for is GFXArrows, which draws arrows in varying
shapes.  Who'dda thought that one would be the popular one?  

The one I think is most useful is GFXLayers.  It allows you to visually
align layers in all sorts of ways, interactively, using thumbnails of
the layers.  It's not the best UI design, but it works well.  Maybe if I
get some feedback on the problems with the UI I'll be able to make it
easier to use.

GFXShapes needs thumbnail support.  I need to add GdkPixbuf support to
it for showing the page preview layout, similar to the way GFXLayers
lets you drag layer previews around the page.  It probably needs a way
to easily add new, prebuilt shapes.  GFXShapes was my answer to the
common question "How do you draw simple shapes?"  GFig is the normal
tool for this, but I guess some people find it daunting to use.  It's
not *that* hard.  :-)

GFXTrans is best for doing multiple rotations for animations.  The
builtin rotation transform for GIMP is better for simple layer
rotations.

GFXMerge is the result of a posting someone put on one of the mailing
lists asking for a way to split layers out into their own images or to
merge layers from one image into another.  It's very good at merging
(splitting is broke in the beta but will probably be fixed soon), though
I don't know how often anyone needs that.

GFXCards lets you duplicate an image onto multiple cells, like for
printing business cards, or create a printable image for use with
greeting cards using an existing image for one side of the card.  I use
it mostly for business cards.  It's a brute force approach, creating a
big image at the correct DPI.   A better method would be to generate a
PS image that can be sent to the printer using a single copy of the
orignal image.  That would sure be a lot less memory intensive.

Most of these (or is it all? I can't remember) are supposed to allow you
to save your presets as XML files and reload them later.  This is good
for GFXShapes and GFXArrows, for example.  Unfortunately, in the beta
release the presets may not be working.  I'll get that fixed.  I doubt
its a big problem - they worked fine under GIMP 1.2.

> And...my most profound thank you for converting your shareware into an
> Open Source application. Really, really really!

Nobody was paying for them anyway.  Just saves me the trouble of trying
to build it for multiple platforms.  It's a lot of work maintaining a
bunch of different distributions like that.  :-)  I was also maintaining
ports of a ton of plug-ins I found on the net as part of the original
Graphics Muse Tools CD because they were not available in binary format
for end users.  But alas, few people paid for that so I dropped support
for those other plugins.  Way too much work for one guy.  Now I just
maintain the ones I wrote.

Hope you find them useful.  I need to get GIMP Perl working eventually
to make sure the Perl plugins work under GIMP 2.2 too.
-- 
Michael J. Hammel - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - XEUS: www.ximba.org
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Mediocrity:  It takes a lot less time and most people won't notice the
difference until it's too late.

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