Hi,

with some help from Mitch we now have a nice little feature in CVS that will hopefully turn out to be useful especially for newbies. The CVS version is now able to display a short explanation for the selected menu-item in the statusbar of the image window. We will probably also allow to have this information displayed in a tooltip. This allows us to give the user some hints about what all the different menu entries, especially the plethora of filters, will do. That should make it a lot easier to explore the GIMP menus.

For the core functions we use the tooltip field as registered with the action that is bound to the menu entry. The code for this lives entirely in the app/action directory. I have started to add tooltips for some of the menu entries but I would like to see this work being continued by a native speaker who is also an experienced GIMP user.

For the plug-ins we use the blurb as registered with the plug-in procedure. Most plug-ins do already register such a blurb but all of them need to be reviewed. Currently most blurbs are oriented towards a developer who wants to use the procedure from a script. The blurbs use terms such as "drawable" which must not show up in the UI. Other plug-ins just duplicate the menu label or have useless blurbs such as "No description". So someone will have to go through all the plug-ins and make sure that each procedure, for which a menu entry is registered, has a reasonable blurb. After review, the blurb should be marked for translation. As an example I have done this for the blur, gauss and mblur plug-ins.

We should try to find a consistent style for the descriptions. They should be short enough to fit into the statusbar of a medium-sized image window. The description should not duplicate the menu label but give additional information. If possible, it should describe the action using different words. Not all of the descriptions that I added yesterday match these criteria. We will probably need to go over the descriptions a few times, review and improve them incrementally.

Any volunteers for this job? You will need to work with the CVS version but you do not necessarily have to compile the code (but it probably helps a lot to do that). I will try to help as much as possible but I would really welcome some help with this. Especially since I am not a native speaker and this task is a lot about finding the right words.

Sven

Hi,

"David Gowers" writes:

The blurbs use terms such as "drawable" which must not show up in the UI.

Is there any less obscure term? Most of the filters, if they work on a layer, also work on a channel (the color related ones being the main exception). Is 'layer / channel' an acceptable substitute?

Not mentioning the target at all is probably the best solution in most cases. I am open for other suggestions but I think that using "layer / channel" is more confusing than helpful.

We should try to find a consistent style for the descriptions. They should be short enough to fit into the statusbar of a medium-sized image window. The description should not duplicate the menu label but

I have no idea how big a medium-sized image window is (or for that matter a medium sized image).

One that goes across, say, half of your screen? The length of the blurb will become less of a problem if we also allow to have it displayed as a tooltip.

I'd like to finish off bug #130123 first (get it to a state where I know the patch is acceptable and it's just waiting to be committed), then I will be happy to work on this.

I hope that Mitch and you can sort out the issues with this patch. I know that Mitch and me agree that it is a good idea in general. So we definitely want to have your feature in 2.4, it's just a matter of solving the remaining issues with the patch.

However I would love if work on the blurbs and action tooltips could start as soon as possible. So if there are any other volunteers, please don't be afraid to speak up. I am sure that we can arrange things to that multiple people can work on this.

Sven