Hi,

On Sun, 2008-10-19 at 12:07 -0700, First Last wrote:

I am a new user to GIMP, but haven't for the life of me been able to find a way to search the GIMP user manual or help.

There is no search option in the locally installed user manual (yet). But you can use the search entry in the online version at http://docs.gimp.org/

I'm expecting to see a box where I can enter a word to search for, but can't see one and can't find an icon to produce one. And since the doc comes up in a window with no Edit option, there's also no Windows-like find in this page option either.

The new help-browser in the 2.6 version of GIMP does provide "find in this page" functionality though. Just press Ctrl-F to activate it.

Unfortunately the installer that Jernej provides for the Windows platform does not include the new help-browser plug-in. It seems to be problematic to build the GTK+ version of webkit on Windows. Hopefully someone can manage to do this build at some point so that users on the Windows platform can also benefit from the much improved help browser in GIMP 2.6.

Sven

Hi,

On Sun, 2008-10-19 at 12:07 -0700, First Last wrote:

I am a new user to GIMP, but haven't for the life of me been able to find a way to search the GIMP user manual or help.

I am interested to learn why you need to search the user manual at all.

We might want to add such a feature, but that requires us to understand under what circumstances a user would want to perform a search in the user manual and what he/she would be searching for.

Another question: Do you know that that you can open the relevant page in the user manual by pressing the F1 key (or using the Help button) in each GIMP dialog and also on each menu item in GIMP?

Sven

First Last wrote:

I am a new user to GIMP, but haven't for the life of me been able to find a way to search the GIMP user manual or help. I'm expecting to see a box where I can enter a word to search for, but can't see one and can't find an icon to produce one. And since the doc comes up in a window with no Edit option, there's also no Windows-like find in this page option either. Help!!!

Use the documentation online, and search with Google, e.g.:

layers site:docs.gimp.org

Jon

On Sunday 19 October 2008, Sven Neumann wrote:

I am a new user to GIMP, but haven't for the life of me been able to find a way to search the GIMP user manual or help.

I am interested to learn why you need to search the user manual at all.

We might want to add such a feature, but that requires us to understand under what circumstances a user would want to perform a search in the user manual and what he/she would be searching for.

Hi,

often information about one topic is scattered around the manual, which probably can ahrdly be avoided. As an example, selections are covered in articles about their tool preference dialogs, the Select menu, the quickmask, a general introduction (gimp-painting.html), gimp-using-selections.html (the most asked for on irc) and several others (convert to/from selections).

The articles are well linked between each other, but that's a tedious way of finding the relevant piece of information. Probably it's not a real search that's needed but a link to the index, so here it is (to the original poster):

http://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-help-index.html

Another way to search the manual is to use you favourite search engine, google for example works with search terms like this:

"site:docs.gimp.org/en/ "

Daniel

Hi,

On Sun, 2008-10-19 at 22:51 +0200, Daniel Hornung wrote:

The articles are well linked between each other, but that's a tedious way of finding the relevant piece of information. Probably it's not a real search that's needed but a link to the index, so here it is (to the original poster):

http://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-help-index.html

Well, the index is always just one click away in the help-browser. And in the new help-browser the index is even present all the time in the side-pane on the left side.

Sven

Sven Newman wrote

Another question: Do you know that that you can open the relevant page in the user manual by pressing the F1 key (or using the Help button) in each GIMP dialog and also on each menu item in GIMP?

On some computer that is done by SHIFT +F1 while only F1 open the more generic helph and no the context help

___

On Tuesday 21 October 2008, First Last wrote:

Ok, let me explain the situation I had today that prompted the posting. I have some photos that have some pretty bad vignetting and I was hoping GIMP could take care of it for me. So I was expecting I could open the Help or the user manual and just search for "vignetting" and that would take me right to the spot in the manual that would explain it.

Since the manual is a manual and not a selection of tutorials, you'll find mainly documentation about GIMP's functions there, not about how to use them for some effect or another. So even a search function doesn't replace a broader search across other web sites.

Luckily for you, there's an official tutorial that might do what you want, although it's not in the manual:
http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Quickmask/

I hope this link helps, Daniel