Carol Spears writes:
> there are rumors lately that tor will be working on getting the pspi
> filter thingies working on linux. when they become available will that
> be announced on this list?
Sure; Today I built pspi on SUSE 10 and Ubuntu. Downloadable from
http://www.gimp.org/~tml/gimp/win32/pspi.html . Hopefully the Ubuntu
binary works for Debian, too? Or are the shared library sonames too
different? I wonder whether either binary might work on Fedora, too?
Sorry, no distro-specific packages (.rpm or .dev), just tarballs with
three files: README.linux, pspi and pspi.exe.so. Plus a source
tarball, of course.
> there is always the chance that photoshop plug-ins are a magical thing
> that a simpleton like me could not ever concieve of emulating, it would
> be nice for me to know this though.
Well, many of them *are* quite trivial and already implemented in
GIMP. But I guess some of them are not that trivial.
Please also keep in mind that pspi works only with 3rd-party Photoshop
plug-ins, not the ones by Adobe that ship with Photoshop.
Here's the contents of pspi's README.linux:
How to use a binary Linux distribution of pspi
==
You should have three files:
README.linux, this file
pspi, a small shell script
pspi.exe.so, the binary that wine runs
Copy pspi and pspi.exe.so to your personal GIMP plug-ins folder,
typically ~/.gimp-2.2/plug-ins .
When you run GIMP it will issue a warning "wire_read(): error" as
pspi.exe.so isn't a GIMP plug-in. This warning is harmless (GIMP just
ignores that file then), but if you want to avoid it, move pspi.exe.so
somewhere else and modify the pspi script to point to its new location
instead.
After starting GIMP, go to the Xtns:Photoshop Plug-in Settings and
enter the folder where you are going to keep the 3rd-party Photoshop
plug-ins (.8bf files) that you want to use in GIMP.
Preferrably you should use an initially empty folder for this, and
then install (copy) Photoshop plug-ins there one by one, verifying
that each works. It isn't really useful to rush and install a shitload
of Photoshop plug-ins at once and assume they all will work under
pspi.
And here is the general README file:
Introduction
This is pspi, a GIMP plug-in that interfaces to Photoshop filter plug-ins.
First, the bad news: Pspi only works on systems that understand i386
Windows executables, more specifically, DLLs. (Photoshop plug-ins are
actually DLLs.) Pspi was developed on (i386) Windows. It is also
possible to build and use it on i386 Linux, using Wine.
To build pspi, you will need the headers from the Adobe Photoshop 6
SDK. It used to freely available from Adobe, but unfortunately isn't
any longer. If you can find an old copy of Photoshop 6, the SDK is
included on the CD.
To build pspi on Linux, configure it like this:
CC=winegcc ./configure --with-pssdk=/path/to/pssdk6
Before compiling on Linux, you need to fix a few glitches in the PS6
SDK headers:
-In PhotoshopAPI/Pica_sp/SPProps.h, change the #include of SPMdata.h
to use the correct file name SPMData.h. (On Windows, this of course is
not relevant as the file system is case-insensitive.)
-In SampleCode/Common/Include/PIUtilities.h, comment out the #include
of Types.h, whatever that is, which is not needed.
-In SampleCode/Common/Include/WinUtilities, put the extern "C"
begin and end braces inside #ifdef __cplusplus..#endif .
Debugging pspi
==
You can set the environment variable PSPI_DEBUG to have pspi print out
various debugging messages at run-time, for instance (in a Windows
command prompt):
set PSPI_DEBUG=resource_suite:debugger
(or in a Linux shell):
export PSPI_DEBUG=pipl
See the source code for other possible values. Obviously, this
environment variable must be set before starting the GIMP (which
eventually runs pspi).
On Windows, as pspi is a Windows GUI application, to actually see the
debugging print-out, you have to start GIMP from a command line with
stdout going somewhere, for instance:
gimp --verbose | cat
This stdout redirection will be inherited by GIMP's children, like
pspi.
Run-time setup
==
Pspi has a search path consisting of folders where to search for
Photoshop filter plug-ins, which are files with the extension
.8BF. These folders are searched recursively.
Pspi stores info about the Photoshop plug-ins found in the pspirc file
in the user's personal GIMP directory. The first time a .8BF file is
noticed, pspi loads it and searches for the so-called "PIPL"
resources, which contain some more information about the Photoshop
plug-in, for instance where it should be located in Photoshop's Filter
menu. It gets a identical menu entry in GIMP's /Filter menu.
Unless the .8BF file changes, it isn't loaded on subsequent GIMP
starts, but only when the filter is invoked.
Also files with the extensions .EFF and .DLL are checked to see if
they are Photoshop plug-ins.
Reverse engineering
=
