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<th colspan="3" align="center" id="chaptername">2.2. New in GIMP 2.0</th>
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<div class="sect2" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
<div class="titlepage">
<div>
<div>
<h3 class="title"><a id="id3303578"></a>2.2. New in GIMP 2.0</h3>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p>
First, a statistic: the Gimp code base contains about 230,000
lines of C code, and most of these lines were rewritten in the
evolution from 1.2 to 2.0. From the user's point of view,
however, Gimp 2 is fundamentally similar to Gimp 1; the features
are similar enough that Gimp 1 users won't be lost. As part of
the restructuring work, the developers cleaned up the code
greatly, an investment that, while not directly visible to the
user, will ease maintenance and make future additions less
painful. Thus, the Gimp 2 code base is significantly better
organized and more maintainable than was the case for Gimp 1.2.
</p>
<div class="simplesect" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
<div class="titlepage">
<div>
<div>
<h4 class="title"><a id="id3302801"></a>Basic tools</h4>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p>
The basic tools in GIMP 2 are not very different from their
predecessors in GIMP 1. The "Select Regions by Color" tool is now
shown in the GIMP toolbox, but was already included in GIMP 1 as
a menu option in the Select menu. The Transform tool has been
divided into several specialized tools: Rotation, Scale,
Shearing and Perspective. Color operations are now associated
with layers in the menu "Layer ->Colors", but this is merely a
cleanup: they were already present in the Image menu
(illogically, since they are layer operations). Thus no
completely new tools appear in this release, but two of the
tools have been totally revamped compared to the older versions:
the Text tool and the Path tool. More on this below.
</p>
<p>
The user interface for tools has also changed significantly. The
"Tool Options" dialog box was modified to not resize itself when
a new tool is chosen. Most users felt that the window changing
size when a new tool was selected was annoying. Now, by default
the "Tool Options" dialog is constantly open and docked under
the toolbox, where it can easily be found.
</p>
</div>
<div class="simplesect" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
<div class="titlepage">
<div>
<div>
<h4 class="title"><a id="id3303292"></a>Tool options</h4>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p>
The "Tool Options" for many tools have new possibilities that
weren't available in GIMP 1. Without being exhaustive, here are
the most noticeable improvements.
</p>
<p>
All selection tools now have mode buttons: Replace, Add,
Subtract and Intersect. In GIMP 1 the only way to change the
selection mode was to use the Ctrl or Shift buttons, which could
get very confusing because those buttons also had other
functions. For example, pressing and holding the Shift key while
using the Rectangle selection tool forces the rectangle to be a
square. Thus, to add a square selection you would first press
Shift, then click the mouse, then release Shift, then press
Shift again, then sweep out the selection with the mouse, then
release Shift. It can now be done more easily.
</p>
<p>
For transformation tools, buttons now control which object
(layer, selection or path) is affected by the
transformation. You can for example transform a rectangular
selection to various quadrilateral shapes. Path transformation
in particular is now easier than it was before.
</p>
<p>
"Fade out" and "Paint Using Gradient" are now available for all
drawing tools. In fact, all drawing tools now have their own
individual brush, gradient and pattern settings, in contrast to
GIMP 1 where there was a single global setting that applied to
all drawing tools. Now you can select different brushes for
the Pencil and the Paint Brush, or different patterns for the
Clone and Fill tools. You can change these setting by using your
mouse wheel over the relevant resource button (this is most
useful for quickly and easily choosing a brush).
</p>
</div>
<div class="simplesect" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
<div class="titlepage">
<div>
<div>
<h4 class="title"><a id="id3303063"></a>User Interface</h4>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p>
The most visible changes in GIMP 2 concern the user
interface. GIMP now uses the GTK2+ graphical toolkit in place of
GTK+. One of the nice features brought by the new libraries is
dockable dialogs, and tab navigation between dialogs docked in
the same window -- a feature present in several popular web
browsers. GIMP 1 was famous for opening dialogs anywhere on your
screen; GIMP 2 can be told to use fixed boxes. Dialogs now
include a little tab-customization menu, which provides maximum
flexibility in organizing your workspace.
</p>
<p>
The Image window has some interesting new features. These are
not necessarily activated by default, but they can be checked as
options in the "Preferences->Interface->Image Windows"
menu. "Show Brush Outline", for example, allows you to see the
outline of the brush when using drawing tools. In the
"Appearance" sub-section, you can toggle whether a menu bar is
present at the top of image windows. You can set an option to
work with the new fullscreen mode. Viewing options are also
available from all image windows using right click to bring up
the menu, then selecting "View". The so-called "image" menu is
also available by clicking on a little triangle in the top left
corner of the drawing space. The setting you choose in the
"Preferences" dialog is used as the default value, and options
you set from an image are used only for that image. (You can
also toggle fullscreen mode by using the F11 key; the Esc key
also exits fullscreen mode).
</p>
<p>
GIMP 2 features keyboard accelerators to ease menu access. If
you find that navigating through menus using your mouse is
onerous, the solution may be to use the keyboard. For example,
if the menu bar is present, to create a new image just hit
Alt-F-N. Without the menu bar, hit Shift-F10 to open the
top-left menu, and use direction keys or F then N to create the
new image. Keyboard accelerators are different from shortcuts:
accelerators are useful to navigate through menus, whereas
shortcuts call a specific menu item directly. For example,
Ctrl-N is a shortcut, and the quickest way to open a new image.
</p>
<p>
To ease access to your most commonly used menu items, the GIMP
has provided dynamic shortcuts for many years. When a menu is
open, you can hover over the desired menu item and hold down
your shortcut combination. This feature is still present, but is
deactivated by default in the GIMP 2.0, to avoid accidental
re-assigning of existing shortcuts.
</p>
<p>
The GIMP also ships with a number of sets of key-bindings for
its menus. If you would like to replace the default GIMP
keybindings by Photoshop bindings, for example, you can move the
file "menurc" in your user data directory to "oldmenurc", and
rename "ps-menurc" to "menurc".
</p>
</div>
<div class="simplesect" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
<div class="titlepage">
<div>
<div>
<h4 class="title"><a id="id3303961"></a>Handling Tabs and Docks</h4>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p>
The GIMP 2.0 introduces a system of tabbed dialogs to allow you
to make your workspace look the way you want it to be. Almost
all dialogs can be dragged to another dialog window and dropped
to make a tabbed dialog set.
</p>
<p>
Furthermore, at the bottom of each dialog, there is a dockable
area: drag and drop tabs here to attach dialogs beneath the
bottom tab group.
</p>
</div>
<div class="simplesect" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
<div class="titlepage">
<div>
<div>
<h4 class="title"><a id="id3303903"></a>Scripting</h4>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p>
"Python-fu" is now the standard external scripting interface for
GIMP 2. This means that you can now use GIMP functions in Python
scripts, or conversely use Python to write GIMP plug-ins. Python
is relatively easy to understand even for a beginner, especially
in comparison to the Lisp-like Scheme language used for
Script-fu in GIMP 1. The Python bindings are augmented by a set
of classes for common operations, so you are not forced to
search through the complete GIMP Procedural Database in order to
carry out basic operations. Moreover, Python has integrated
development environments and a gigantic library, and runs not
only on Linux but also on Microsoft Windows and Macintosh OS
X. The biggest drawback, for GIMP 2.0, is that the standard user
interface offered in Python-fu does not use the complete power
of the Python language. The interface is currently designed to
support simple scripts, but a more sophisticated version is a
goal of future development.
</p>
<p>
GIMP-Perl is no longer distributed with the standard GIMP 2
distribution, but is available as a separate package. Currently,
GIMP-Perl is supported only on Unix-like operating systems. It
includes both a simple scripting language, and the ability to
code more polished interfaces using the Gtk2 perl module. Direct
pixel manipulation is available through the use of PDL.
</p>
<p>
Script-fu, based on Scheme, has the same drawbacks as before:
not intuitive, hard to use and lacking a real development
environment. It does, however, have one major advantage compared
to Python-fu: Script-fu scripts are directly interpreted by GIMP
and do not require any additional software
installation. Python-fu requires that you install a package for
the Python language.
</p>
</div>
<div class="simplesect" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
<div class="titlepage">
<div>
<div>
<h4 class="title"><a id="id3303753"></a>The Text Tool</h4>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p>
The big problem with the standard text tool in GIMP 1 was that
text could not be modified after it was rendered. If you wanted
to change anything about the text, all you could do was "undo"
and try again (if you were lucky enough to have sufficient undo
history available, and then of course you would also undo any
other work you had done in the meantime). In GIMP 1.2 there was
also a "dynamic text" plugin that allowed you to create special
text layers and keep them around indefinitely, in a modifiable
form, but it was buggy and awkward to use. The second generation
Text tool is an enhanced combination of the old Text tool and
the Dynamic Text plugin. Now all options are available in the
"Tool Options": font, font size, text color, justify,
antialiasing, indent, spacing. To create a new text item, click
in the image and a little editor pops up. Text appears on the
image while you are editing (and carriage returns are handled
properly!). A new dedicated layer is created; this layer resizes
dynamically to match the text you key in. You can import plain
text from a file, and you can even do things like writing from
right to left in Arabic. If you select a text layer, clicking on
it opens the editor, and you can then modify your text.
</p>
</div>
<div class="simplesect" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
<div class="titlepage">
<div>
<div>
<h4 class="title"><a id="id3304058"></a>The Path Tool</h4>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p>
The second generation Path tool has a completely new
interface. The first major difference you notice is that paths
are no longer required to be closed. A path can be made up of a
number of disjoint curve segments. The next major difference is
that now the path tool has three different modes, Design, Edit
and Move.
</p>
<p>
In Design mode, you can create a path, add nodes to an existing
path and modify the shape of a curve either by dragging edges of
the curve or dragging the "handles" of a node.
</p>
<p>
In Edit mode, you can add nodes in the middle of curve edges,
and remove nodes or edges, as well as change the shape of the
curve. You can also connect two path components.
</p>
<p>
The third mode, Move, is, as you might expect, used to move path
components. If your path has several components, you can move
each path component separately. To move all components at once,
use the Shift key.
</p>
<p>
Two other path-related features are new in the GIMP 2.0. The
GIMP can not only import an SVG image as a raster image, but can
also keep SVG paths intact as GIMP paths. This means that the
GIMP is now more able than ever to complement your favourite
vector drawing tool. The other feature which has made the path
tool much better is the introduction of vector-based
stroking. In previous versions, stroking paths and selections
was a matter of drawing a brush-stroke along the path. This mode
is still available, but it is now possible to stroke a curve
accurately, using the vector library libart.
</p>
</div>
<div class="simplesect" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
<div class="titlepage">
<div>
<div>
<h4 class="title"><a id="id3303504"></a>Other improvements</h4>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p>
Some other improvements in brief:
</p>
<div class="itemizedlist">
<ul type="disc">
<li>
<p>
Higher-quality antialiasing in some places -- most notibly in
the Text tool.
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
Icons and menus are skinnable. You can create your own icon set
and apply it to the toolbox using the "Preference->Interface"
menu option. A theme called "small" is included with the
standard distribution.
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
An image can be saved as a template and used to create new images.
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
There are four new combination modes for layers that lie one on
top of another within an image: Hard Light, Soft Light, Grain
Extract and Grain Merge.
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
If there is an active selection, you can crop the image directly
to the selection size using image menu "Image->Crop".
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
As well as being able to create guides, there's now a grid
functionality in GIMP. It is complimentary to the guides
functionality and makes it easier to position objects so that
they align perfectly.
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
The Layers dialog is more coherent, in that there are no more
hidden functions accessed only with right click on the miniature
image of the layer that appears there. You can now handle layer
operations directly from the image menu: Layer Mask,
Transparency, Transformation and Layer Color operations are
directly in Layer submenu.
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
Color display filters are now available from the image menu
"View->Display Filters". Using them, you can simulate different
gamma values, different contrasts, or even color deficient
vision, without altering your original image. This actually has
been a feature of the GIMP developer versions for a long time,
but it has never been stable enough to appear in a stable
version of the GIMP before.
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
The color selection dialog has a new CMYK mode, associated with
the printer icon.
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
Data stored in EXIF tags by digital cameras are now handled in
read and write mode for JPEG files.
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
MNG animations are now supported. The MNG file format can be
considered as animated PNG. It has all the advantages of PNG
over GIF, such as more colors, 256 levels of transparency, and
perhaps most importantly, lack of patent encumbrance. The format
is a web standard and all recent popular web browsers support
it.
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
The GIMP Animation package now does onion-skinning, a bluescreen
feature was added as well as audio support.
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
A channel mixer filter, previously available from the web as an
add-on, appears in "Filters->Colors".
</p>
</li>
</ul>
</div>
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