[Gimp-developer] Re: [CinePaint-dev] GIMP/CinePaint fileincompatibility
Ernst, > Couldn't both teams try to find a common format? In theory yes, but it seems unlikely. Sven said today that GIMP has been (privately) discussing a new XML-based file format for GIMP for more than three years -- which is the first I've heard of it. However, no spec has been made available. Without any knowledge of what GIMP was up to, I've been working on the design of a new XML-based file format for CinePaint for two months. I posted the preliminary spec for comment a month ago, and it is about to go into implementation. It could appear in CinePaint in as little as a month. We're not going to wait for GIMP. Cheers, Robin --- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Hollywood, California www.CinePaint.org Free motion picture and still image editing software ___ Gimp-developer mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer
Re: [Gimp-developer] Re: [CinePaint-dev] GIMP/CinePaint fileincompatibility
On Wed, 09 Jul 2003 18:42:08 +0200 Sven Neumann <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Him > > "Robin Rowe" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > The plan is for CinePaint to move away from this undocumented and > > incompatible XCF format we inherited -- and can't properly support > > -- to a new XML-ish file format that will be called CPX. I am still > > designing that, but have already documented the basic format. It > > should replace gbr too. > > You might then be interested to hear that we started to discuss a new > file format for GIMP more than 3 years ago and came up with an XML > based design as well. More details will probably be made up at the > GIMP developers conference next month. Couldn't both teams try to find a common format? After all XML is quite flexible and it should be easy to flag the extensions that are not supported by the other program. Both programs have a lot in common. Users will really appreciate it when they can easily exchange data between the two programs. (I know this is probably not quite the right moment to suggest this) greetings, Ernst Lippe (PS. Robin I would apreciate it if you could forward this message to the cinepaint-developers list. I think that this is an important issue for both groups of developers.) ___ Gimp-developer mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer
Re: [Gimp-developer] Re: [CinePaint-dev] GIMP/CinePaint fileincompatibility
Hi,
Robin Rowe wrote:
> Just so everyone knows, the GIMP has a different management style
> than CinePaint and doesn't identify its team -- except for Yosh,
> the GIMP release manager. Sven is perceived as the project manager
> of GIMP.
I would like to clarify this - the GIMP is now 8 years old, 8 or
9 years old, and the original authors are long gone. What has
happened since then is something of a co-operative effort,
whereby a group of the current developers just kind of decide
stuff.
This is haphasard at times, but it would be incorrect to say that
we don't identify our team. But the team changes very regularly.
That is not to say that certain characters who have been around
for a while do not have more credence than others. It might be
worthwhile to keep an up-to-date list of current developers,
along with their domains of interest/responsibility, but the
GIMP's authors are publicly acknowledged in the AUTHORS file.
I'm not sure how Sven feels about the title "Program manager" -
if it helps you to label him as such, then so be it. He is one of
the main developers around at the moment, and works more or less
full time on the GIMP, so he has more say in contentious issues
than blow-ins like me, but everyone is heard (often leading to
bikeshed arguments, but there we go), and decisions get made more
or less by concensus (which is a partly a factor in certain
things taking longer than they might).
> You are right that our gbr brushes are different from GIMP's. Although I
> appreciate you considering it, they can't be made fully compatible with GIMP
> because of bit depth. The best you could do would be to crush down to 8-bit
> when opening our 16-bit brushes.
As a proposal for a modification which would bring back
compatibility, we could expand the header by 4 bytes to include
bit depth (8 or 16), which could then be factored into the load
routines of both our apps (we would crush 16 bit nbrushes down to
8 bits, and you would expand 8 bit brushes to 16 bits). As a file
format change, it would allow is backward compatibility, since
the format changes nothing in the other header fields.
> By the way, where would I find your docs for the GIMP gbr format?
After reading this mail, I drew up a specification of the gbr
format. It's fairly straightformward, and is obvious from the
header files & source, but a text file documenting the format is
no harm.
I will put it in the devel-docs directory of the GIMP CVS, and
attach it inline here (I believe that our list software, and
probably yours, doesn't like attachments).
Cheers,
Dave.
The GIMP Paintbrush File Format Version 2 (.gbr)
HEADER
--
Bytes 0 - 3: header_size:
Type: 32 bit unsigned int
Value: size of brush header (28) + length of brush name
Bytes 4 - 7: version
Type: 32 bit unsigned int
Value: The file format version. Currently
Bytes 8 - 11: width
Type: 32 bit unsigned int
Value: Brush width
Bytes 12 - 15: height
Type: 32 bit unsigned int
Value: Brush height
Bytes 16 - 19: bytes
Type: 32 bit unsigned int
Value: Colour depth of brush.
1 = greyscale, 4 = RGBA
Bytes 20 - 23: magic_number
Type: 32 bit unsigned int
Value: GIMP brush magic number.
('G' << 24) + ('I' << 16) + ('M' << 8) + 'P'
Bytes 24 - 27: spacing
Type: 32 bit unsigned int
Value: Default spacing to be used for brush. Percentage
of brush width.
Bytes 28 - (header_size - 28):
Type: char *
Value: UTF-8 string - name of brush
BODY
Size: width * height * bytes
Type: uchar *
Value: Pixel values (row-first) for brush
--
David Neary,
Lyon, France
E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
___
Gimp-developer mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer
[Gimp-developer] Re: [CinePaint-dev] GIMP/CinePaint fileincompatibility
Him "Robin Rowe" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > The situation is worse than you think. Not only has the brush format > been modified, the XCF format has been broken, too. Again, for > higher bit depths than GIMP supports. Our users are surprised that > they can't read 8-bit GIMP XCF files even though XCF is listed as > our native format. I was afraid you would say that. Well, as with the brush file format, there is not much we can do now. I still cannot believe that anyone would be so mindless to do such a change, but it happened. The intention of my mail was to ensure that such things don't happen again in the future. > By the way, where would I find your docs for the GIMP gbr format? app/core/gimpbrush.[ch] > The plan is for CinePaint to move away from this undocumented and > incompatible XCF format we inherited -- and can't properly support > -- to a new XML-ish file format that will be called CPX. I am still > designing that, but have already documented the basic format. It > should replace gbr too. You might then be interested to hear that we started to discuss a new file format for GIMP more than 3 years ago and came up with an XML based design as well. More details will probably be made up at the GIMP developers conference next month. Sven ___ Gimp-developer mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer
[Gimp-developer] Re: [CinePaint-dev] GIMP/CinePaint fileincompatibility
Sven, Hi. Thanks for writing. This is your first post to our list cinepaint-developers, and people here may wonder who you are and why you are introducing yourself by making demands. You haven't identified your role in GIMP and aren't mentioned in the authors list on gimp.org (http://gimp.org/the_gimp_about.html). Just so everyone knows, the GIMP has a different management style than CinePaint and doesn't identify its team -- except for Yosh, the GIMP release manager. Sven is perceived as the project manager of GIMP. You are right that our gbr brushes are different from GIMP's. Although I appreciate you considering it, they can't be made fully compatible with GIMP because of bit depth. The best you could do would be to crush down to 8-bit when opening our 16-bit brushes. The situation is worse than you think. Not only has the brush format been modified, the XCF format has been broken, too. Again, for higher bit depths than GIMP supports. Our users are surprised that they can't read 8-bit GIMP XCF files even though XCF is listed as our native format. While researching how to make our files more compatible with GIMP, I found your for-the-record statement that GIMP XCF is deliberately undocumented: http://lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/lists/gimp-developer/2003-February/008106.html I agree with you that our file formats are a mess, but none of this happened on my watch. I can't answer your question who made the change to the brush format because it predates my participation. A person who may know is Yosh, the GIMP release manager. In any case, it seems clear that the person who made the change would have been one of the original GIMP developers who worked on Film Gimp. I'm unaware of any implementation docs on what they did. By the way, where would I find your docs for the GIMP gbr format? You are probably unaware that we have already done a quite bit of work eliminating file collisions with GIMP. Because the original plan for the Film Gimp branch was for it to be GIMP, the original developers didn't anticipate any name change. The plan is for CinePaint to move away from this undocumented and incompatible XCF format we inherited -- and can't properly support -- to a new XML-ish file format that will be called CPX. I am still designing that, but have already documented the basic format. It should replace gbr too. Cheers, Robin --- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Hollywood, California www.CinePaint.org Free motion picture and still image editing software - Original Message - From: "Sven Neumann" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Wednesday, July 09, 2003 5:31 AM Subject: [CinePaint-dev] GIMP brush format version 3 > Hi, > > yesterday someone from the GIMP developers stumpled across this page: > > http://cinepaint.sourceforge.net/dev/brushes.html > > After examing the brushes that can be downloaded there, we found that > GIMP can not read them although they have the .gbr extension and the > magic file header for GIMP brushes. Actually it's even the very same > format but version 3. But, version 3 of the GIMP brush format does not > exist. What happened here? > > I don't know exactly when this change to the brush format was made nor > who made it. I just want to state that this is an inacceptible > procedure. If FilmGIMP or CinePaint needs a new brush format for > whatever reasons, they are of course free to design the new format > closely to the GIMP brush format. But it can not be that you simply > take the GIMP brush format and increase the version number. This is > something that only the GIMP developers can decide to do. If for some > reason you wanted to stick with the GIMP brush format, you should have > at least asked. We could then have decided on a format change and > include support for the new file format version in both applications. > >From reading your web-page I understood that CinePaint does not even > support the GBR versions 1 and 2 that are used by The GIMP. This seems > to indicate that you just needed a new and different format. You should > have at least changed the magic file header then so that utilities > such as file(1) are able to differentiate between GIMP brushes and > CinePaint brushes. > > There is not much we can do to change this situation now that it has > happened. I am not going to yell at anyone since I don't even know how > far this change dates back. But I want you to know that we are upset > about what happened and I ask you to assure that similar things don't > happen in the future. File formats are crucial and we can not accept > any incompatibilities caused by third-party developers changing our > file formats. > > Well, there is one thing we can do: If someone would provide us with > the details about the version 3 brush format, we might decide to > include support for it in The GIMP. This would at least reduce > confusion among our users. > > > Sven > > >
