Tiny patch for the psp plug-in.
While following Adrian's nice tutorial on Gimp Image Pipes, I tried to load some PSP Tubes and see if I could convert them to Gimp's GIH format, using gimp-1.1.21 under Solaris (sparc). All of them failed with the error "PSP: Unrecognized block id ...". This comes from a missing conversion from little endian format to big endian. All integer values from the header are correctly converted, except for the block id. The patch is small, so instead of reporting a bug to bugs.gnome.org and/or submitting the patch to ftp.gimp.org, I am including it below. This is against gimp-1.1.21 (the one I have at work for the moment, until I find the time to install 1.1.22). I quickly checked the Changelog using Bonsai and I did not see any recent changes to that plug-in, so I assume that the patch is still valid for 1.1.22. -Raphael --- plug-ins/common/psp.c~ Mon May 1 19:43:17 2000 +++ plug-ins/common/psp.c Thu May 18 17:12:55 2000 @@ -536,7 +536,7 @@ *total_len = GUINT32_FROM_LE (len); } - return id; + return GUINT16_FROM_LE (id); } static gint
Re: Status of help system?
Kevin Turner wrote: What is the status of the help system these days? Is there a help browser procedure which calls on extension_web_browser if the gtkxhtml browser is not available? Yes, Netscape is called it no help browser is found. How does the help system work for 3rd party plug-ins and scripts? This is on my todo. Will be a simple function gimp_help_register() which will take a directory name. The help files mentioned in gimp_dialog_new() etc. will be relative to this directory. There will also be a standard way for plug-ins which don't want to register their own help path. The canonical path for these plugins will be "$DATADIR/help/C/contrib/plug_in_name/whatever.html" Feel free to suggest a better word than "contrib", it was just the first which came to my mind. Can images be included in the help? If so, what are the naming conventions? As 3rd party plug-ins will have their own directory anyway, it's up to the plug-in's maintainer. A good choice maybe to prefix all help files for a plug-in with the plug-in's name and a underscore. bye, --Mitch
Request for new, high-quality, brushes (and maybe patterns too)
Except for the vines and green pepper, the latest version of the Gimp ships with basically the same set of brushes as version 1.0. Even the gimp-data-extra package does not contain anything that demonstrates the power of the pixmap brushes or pipes. It would be good to add two or three high-quality brushes to the default brushes shipped with version 1.2. There should be no more than two or three new brushes (no bloatware), if possible showing different features of the pixmap brushes/pipes: orientation, sequence, and so on. Of course we can add even more brushes and patterns in the corresponding gimp-data-extras package, but the default distribution should be reasonably small. There are many pages containing nice PSP tubes, for example: http://bart.northnet.com.au/~robrow/tubes/downloads.htm http://www.cablevision.qc.ca/renlev/tubes.html But we cannot convert them to Gimp brushes without violating some copyrights or some of the limitations that they put on redistribution. So we should try to create our own copyright-free brushes. By the way, I think that the current gimp-data-extras contain too many "abstract" brushes and patterns. It would be nice to have some good images of stones, leaves, wood, flowers, grass, sky, fur,... that are scanned directly from Mother Nature. I have just started doing that myself, but I would be good if several of us could do it so that we could have a nice collection. Some of the PSP tubes are good examples of the kind of high-quality stuff that we should distribute with gimp-1.2 (some are bad examples too; just ignore them). I am not sure about how to coordinate this effort and how to select the best brushes and patterns (we need only the best stuff in the distribution). Any suggestions? If nobody volunteers, maybe I could collect the submissions (by e-mail?), put them on some web page and then wait for comments, but I would only do that as a last resort because being behind a firewall prevents me from setting up some automated process. That's why I am asking here for ideas and volunteers instead of posting a request directly on the gimp-users list or in comp.graphics.apps.gimp. I would be nice to do that before 1.2 is released. -Raphael
