On 03 Mar 2003 11:45:16 -0600, "Michael J. Hammel" wrote:

Comments on the Preferences dialog:

And here are my comments on (some of) your comments... I agree with most of your suggestions, so I only quoted the parts on which I had something interesting to say.

1. Page: New Image
b. Why isn't "Indexed" included as a default image type option?

Creating a new image in indexed mode would require a default colormap. We could add an option for selecting among the available color palettes, just below the option for selecting the default image type.

c. Why a "dpi" *AND* a Pixels/inch setting? The bottom set, with the "Pixels/inch" options menu should be enough. "DPI" should be part of the text header for this frame.

Because you want to be able to set the default unit? I prefer millimeters instead of inches.

d. Why do we have a "maximum image size?" Shouldn't GIMP handle any image size? Should this value be set as a percentage (rounded to a power of 2) of installed memory?

The label for this option should be changed to "Maximum Image Size Before Warning". This is longer, but this is a better description of what it does. I don't think that it is necessary to set it as a percentage of installed memory.

2. The Comment page should be integrated into the New Image page as a 2nd page in a notebook.

And in the future, it should be able to set more than the default comment. It should also set the default value for other properties used by EXIF and XMP/IPTC metadata. See also: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=56443 (EXIF) http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=94416 (XMP/IPTC) http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=61499 (editor) I still have to work on that...

4. Page: Help System
b. Why aren't Mozilla and Galeon included in the Help Browser list?

This is a FAQ. This gets asked so frequently that we should seriously think about adding a whole paragraph of text in this dialog. Also, "Netscape" should probably be "Netscape-compatible" or something like that. The options should also be different for the Windows build.

7. Page: Image Windows
c. Title formats should be explained - what do each of "f", "p", etc. mean?

If this option gets its own page/tab, then we could explain this in the page. Otherwise, there should be a prominent link to the help page.

8. Merge the Display and Monitor pages. They're similar enough and can fit on one page.

Hmm... No, because they are dealing with different things. If the Display page is merged with something, it should be merged with some of the Image Windowse pages. If this is a notebook, then it would be appropriate to have it as a separate tab in that section.

-Raphaël

mån 2003-03-03 klockan 19.57 skrev Raphaël Quinet:

c. Why a "dpi" *AND* a Pixels/inch setting? The bottom set, with the "Pixels/inch" options menu should be enough. "DPI" should be part of the text header for this frame.

Because you want to be able to set the default unit? I prefer millimeters instead of inches.

The default here (US/metric) should probably be a function of the locale, as that information is already available in the locale. Reported now as http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=107497.

Christian

Hi,

"Michael J. Hammel" writes:

a. Why is the default font for labels so small? My eyes are old!

we use the default GTK+ font size and it is up to you to configure it.

e. Lots of tooltips say "When set to YES..." when referring to toggle buttons or option menus that don't have a "YES" option. These need to be updated.

the strings used for the tooltips are as well used for the gimprc man-page and the comments in the system-wide gimprc. In my opinion the strings are acceptable but if someone wants to change them, please keep in mind that they are not only used as tooltips. An alternative would be to use only check-buttons for boolean values.

I grepped preferences-dialog.c for prefs_boolean_option_menu_add() and I only found two settings that use an option menu for boolean values. Are these lots??

1. Page: New Image
a. Should it be "New Image" or "New Canvas"? Is the canonical name for that window a Canvas? That's what I've been calling it for years (even in my books), but maybe I've been wrong.

That page really refers to settings for the "New Image" dialog.

b. Why isn't "Indexed" included as a default image type option?

because we don't allow to create indexed images from scratch. You need to create a RGB image anc convert it to indexed later. The reason is that we don't want to clutter the New Image dialog with Palette settings.

c. Why a "dpi" *AND* a Pixels/inch setting? The bottom set, with the "Pixels/inch" options menu should be enough. "DPI" should be part of the text header for this frame.

I always found it very convenient to have both.

d. Why do we have a "maximum image size?" Shouldn't GIMP handle any image size? Should this value be set as a percentage (rounded to a power of 2) of installed memory?

That setting is explained in the tooltip. It could probably be reworded. I don't think we want to base it upon installed memory since there is no proper way to determine the amount of installed memory.

2. The Comment page should be integrated into the New Image page as a 2nd page in a notebook.

the right half of the dialog is a notebook already and GTK+ doesn't like notebooks in notebooks that much. We could decide to make the comment textview smaller and add it to the New Image page.

b. Dialog Behavior toggle has tooltip that says "When set to YES...". This should be changed to "When enabled...". Also, "per display" should be changed to "per image window" (or "per canvas window").

I like the idea of using "When enabled..." instead of "When set to yes..." since that should work fine for the manpage as well.

b. Why aren't Mozilla and Galeon included in the Help Browser list?

because of http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51632

5. Tool options should be merged with another page, perhaps the Interface page, until more default options for Tools are provided.

IMO the Contigous Region setting can die now that we have (or almost have) persistent tool options.

6. Despite having few configurable options, the Input Devices page should stay the way it is. It may have more options - I don't have any input devices available to test that.

unfortunately it can not stay. If you had any input devices you'd have found that dialog is pretty much cluttered and that GIMP crashes if you use GTK+-2.2:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=104423

There's another report about this very page which is IMO valid as well:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=95446

7. Page: Image Windows
a. Make this page a notebook, with the following pages: 1. Appearance / Canvas padding color 2. Zoom / Resize, Pointer Movement

see my comment above. We can have multiple pages grouped in the tree view on the left but no notebooks inside a notebook.

c. Title formats should be explained - what do each of "f", "p", etc. mean?

they are explained in the gimprc man-page.

8. Merge the Display and Monitor pages. They're similar enough and can fit on one page.

do you think so? IMO the transparency setting doesn't belong there at all. It fits better to the Canvas settings but then it affects layer and image previews as well (but that could be silently ignored).

c. The tooltip for "File->Save" is incorrect. It should be updated to match the current options menu text.

actually, I'd rather get rid of this setting. Does anyone use anything but the default value ("no") for "trust-dirty-flag" ?

10. Page: Folders
a. What do the green dots in the "Folders" page represent?

they indicate that the file/folder exists. Yes, they suck but it's the default GTK+ "yes" icon.

b. Put the "tenp dir" and "swap dir" in frames. Title each "Location for temporary files" and "Location of swap files". Change the "..." to "Select a directory". This will spread this page's contents out a bit. It looks crowded right now.

hmm, the "..." button is part of the GimpFileSelection widget:

http://developer.gimp.org/api/1.3/libgimpwidgets/GimpFileSelection.html

If we'd change it, we'd also change all the other Folders pages since they use it as well.

Salut, Sven

On Mon, Mar 03, 2003 at 11:45:16AM -0600, Michael J. Hammel wrote:

d. US English vs UK English spellings: "Behavior" in Interface page, "Behaviour" in Image Windows page.

All user interface parts of The GIMP should be US English with any parts translated into British English by using gettext and locale en_GB. Since our resources are limited, the manual & documentation should be US English throughout.

It's possible if your locale /is/ set to en_GB that you're just seeing a partial translation, which you can confirm by running 'LC_ALL=C gimp'

Nick.

Hi,

Nick Lamb writes:

All user interface parts of The GIMP should be US English with any parts translated into British English by using gettext and locale en_GB. Since our resources are limited, the manual & documentation should be US English throughout.

right. There has been work on translating the help as well. At the moment however we should first concentrate on getting help finished for 1.3 in US english.

It's possible if your locale /is/ set to en_GB that you're just seeing a partial translation, which you can confirm by running 'LC_ALL=C gimp'

the string was indeed spelled incorrectly. I have now fixed some of the more obvious things Michael suggested:

2003-03-04 Sven Neumann

Based on suggestions by Michael J. Hammel :

* app/gui/preferences-dialog.c: use US english spelling, fixed a typo.

* app/config/gimprc-blurbs.h: rephrased some blurbs so they fit better as tooltips.

Salut, Sven

BTW: The en_GB translation seems pretty much abandoned. Perhaps someone wants to bring it uptodate ?

Hi,

"Michael J. Hammel" writes:

On Tue, 2003-03-04 at 06:10, Sven Neumann wrote:

we use the default GTK+ font size and it is up to you to configure it.

Why? It would be easy for us to provide a font size setting and stuff it into a GIMP-specific gtkrc file, letting the user know that the changes will take effect the next time GIMP is started. In fact, that's one of the usability features of GTK+ (even if few people talk about it as such).

GTK+ does let the user configure lots of things on their own. But that doesn't mean applications shouldn't provide user friendly options to handle it for the user. (That's an arguable opinion, of course.)

GIMP is probably not the only GTK+ application people are using and setting the font size in the GIMP gtkrc would make it the only GTK+ application that doesn't follow the font settings from the desktop enviroment. This is IMO a very bad idea.

d. Why do we have a "maximum image size?" Shouldn't GIMP handle any image size? Should this value be set as a percentage (rounded to a power of 2) of installed memory?

That setting is explained in the tooltip. It could probably be reworded. I don't think we want to base it upon installed memory since there is no proper way to determine the amount of installed memory.

Is this value meant to be on a per Image Window basis or is it global to all open images? That isn't clear in the tooltip. If its per image, a short addition to the tooltip would cover this, I think.

it is of course per image. The only reason we have introduced this is to prevent the user from accidentally entering wrong values into the New Image dialog, causing GIMP to crash because it cannot allocate enough memory for a 256m x 256m image.

the right half of the dialog is a notebook already and GTK+ doesn't like notebooks in notebooks that much. We could decide to make the comment textview smaller and add it to the New Image page.

Hmmm. Looking at it I'd say the notebook was used to address layout issues and not for its page features. If notebooks in notebooks don't work well (I actually don't think I've ever tried that in my apps), then the top level notebook should be replaced with something else so that a notebook at the page level could be used. The layout issues can be solved with other GTK+ widgets. That's just my opinion on dialog design, of course.

I don't see a way of doing such a dialog layout w/o using a GtkNotebook for the right part. At least not without the dialog resizing on page switches. I'm open for your suggestions however.

Salut, Sven

Hi,

"Michael J. Hammel" writes:

On Tue, 2003-03-04 at 10:48, Sven Neumann wrote:

GIMP is probably not the only GTK+ application people are using and setting the font size in the GIMP gtkrc would make it the only GTK+ application that doesn't follow the font settings from the desktop enviroment. This is IMO a very bad idea.

Perhaps. However, I'm running GNOME with GIMP 1.3 and the fonts for text labels don't match at all - GIMP's are very small, GNOME's are fine. I haven't adjusted any font settings for the desktop and I have no .gtkrc or .gtkrc.mine in my home directory.

do you run gnome-2.x? If not, you shouldn't be surprised that the settings don't take effect. The file ~/.gtkrc is irrelevant for GIMP-1.3 since it uses GTK+-2.x. You should look for .gtkrc-2.0. And then there might be XSettings which override the value found there.

I don't see a way of doing such a dialog layout w/o using a GtkNotebook for the right part. At least not without the dialog resizing on page switches. I'm open for your suggestions however.

Well, it sounds like the notebook is enforcing a minimum size to the dialog for you. You'd have to do this manually by determining which page was the largest. I'm not positive but I think you can do this by realizing each page first, checking the parent widgets width and then setting the dialogs width appropriately before calling gtk_widget_show() (not sure if this has changed in GTK2.0, however).

eeek, what an evil idea. You can of course get this right for your theme and font settings but it will never ever work for everyone.

Salut, Sven

mjhammel@graphics-muse.org (2003-03-03 at 1145.16 -0600):

Comments on the Preferences dialog: 0. General comments
a. Why is the default font for labels so small? My eyes are old!

Uh? If I understand you, what you have is to change your font, cos the font size looks like the default one, and in some places just bigger, but I do not see where it is smaller than the default one. So I do not get it, or the problem is elsewhere.

1. Page: New Image
c. Why a "dpi" *AND* a Pixels/inch setting? The bottom set, with the "Pixels/inch" options menu should be enough. "DPI" should be part of the text header for this frame.

No, DPI should not be in the header, cos if you set the menu to pixel/mm, you are not talking about DPI anymore. You are always talking about resolution. Removing the top one could be an option, keeping is another, and this one is nice for those that want to use see DPI (typical unit for printing) and at the same time get an unit they can imagine quickly (all non inch users), which I think is a noticeable group of people. It is a tricky area for those who have to mix the local units with the graphic units.

d. Why do we have a "maximum image size?" Shouldn't GIMP handle any image size? Should this value be set as a percentage (rounded to a power of 2) of installed memory?

Hehe, the talk about disk cache and such again. ;] BTW, it is not a hard limit, just a warning limit, so errors are corrected faster (ie, not waiting your computer to swap tons of MBs). The problem is the label, probably.

8. Merge the Display and Monitor pages. They're similar enough and can fit on one page.

The transparency thing is more an Image feature (like padding colour). But the 8 bit part could be placed somewhere with other Monitor things.

b. Maybe it's me, but I think the icon for Environment ought to be trees and a sun, not a nerdy IC.

Think in other languages too, maybe in those the correct translation of computer environment has nothing to do with trees. And from looking at the contents, a chip makes sense, it lets you configure memory things.

10. Page: Folders
a. What do the green dots in the "Folders" page represent?

"OKness" of the path. If path is wrong, it appears red.
GSR