gimp/README

The GIMP: The GNU Image Manipulation Program
============================================

This is version 1.3, the developers version of The GIMP. Only use it if you
are brave and curious and want to participate development towards the next
stable release version 1.4. This is a developers version. We know it has bugs
and it might not even compile. You have been warned!

Some features that were present in GIMP 1.2 are disabled or not even included
in this release. The perl bindings as well as all the perl scripts are not any
longer included in this source tree. They have been moved into its own module
called gimp-perl and await being porting to GIMP-1.3 and GTK+-2.0.

The new text tool is only halfway done and various other tools and functions
are broken. Almost everything is under construction. Don't even think about
using this for daily work. If you are a software distributor, dont' dare to
ship this package to innocent users.

For installation instructions, see the file INSTALL.


1. Web Resources
================

The GIMP's home page is at:

	http://www.gimp.org/

Please be sure to visit this site for information, documentation, tutorials,
news, etc.  All things GIMP-ish are available from there.

The automated plug-in registry is located at:

	http://registry.gimp.org/

There you can get the latest versions of plug-ins using a convenient
forms-based interface.

The latest version of The GIMP can be found at:

	http://www.gimp.org/download/


2. Mailing Lists
================

We have several mailing lists dedicated to GIMP user and development
discussion.  There is more info at

	https://lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/<listname>

substituting <listname> for "gimp-announce", "gimp-user", "gimp-win-user", or
"gimp-developer" (without the quotes, of course) depending on the list you
want to subscribe to.  Links to the mailing list archives can be found at the
same addresses as given above.

Gimp-announce is a low-traffic list with announcements about new releases of
GIMP and plug-ins. Gimp-user is a mailing list dedicated to user problems,
hints and tips, discussion of cool effects, etc.  Gimp-developer is oriented
to GIMP core and plug-in developers.  Most people will only want to be
subscribed to gimp-user. If you want to help develop The GIMP, the
gimp-developer mailing list is a good starting point.

There are two mailing lists dedicated to the Win32 port, "gimpwin-users" and
"gimpwin-dev". Especially the latter also carries traffic about the GTk+ port
to Win32 in general. To subscribe, send an empty message to

	gimpwin-users-subscribe@egroups.com
or
	gimpwin-dev-subscribe@egroups.com

respectively. You can also use the web interface at

        http://www.egroups.com/group/gimpwin-users/ and
        http://www.egroups.com/group/gimpwin-dev/ 

Note that as these mailing lists are hosted on egroups.com, the messages from
the list contain relatively unintrusive and easily ignored advertisements at
the end. But if you are absolutely allergic to ads, don't subscribe.


3. IRC
======

And finally, for the real junkies, there is an IRC channel devoted to the
GIMP. On Byxnet (a private mostly-GIMP network) there is #gimp.  Many of the
developers hang out there.  One of the Byxnet servers are:

	irc.gimp.org:6667


4. Customizing
==============

The look of GIMP's interface can be customized like any other GTK app by
editing the ~/.gtkrc file or by using "themes" (ready-made customizations).
For downloadable themes and further details, see http://gtk.themes.org.
Additionally GIMP reads ~/.gimp-1.3/gtkrc so you can have settings that
only apply to The GIMP.

Included is a set of keybindings similar to those in Adobe Photoshop.  You
can find them in the ps-menurc file.  To use them, copy this file to 
~/.gimp-1.3/menurc. You can also manually change the keybindings to any of
your choice by editing ~/.gimp-1.3/menurc.


5. Bugs
=======

Since this is a developers version, we are at the moment not really interested
in receiving too many bug-reports. Some parts of the code are unfinished and
under heavy development and we know that.  Bug-reports for incomplete or
missing are features are therefore often not helpful. Instead of filing a bug
you should try to contact the person who is working on this particular part of
the program (see the ChangeLog) or try to fix it yourself. You should report
crashes and other severe bugs at Bugzilla (http://bugzilla.gnome.org/). Your
bug-report needs to provide detailed instruction of how to reproduce the
problem. For reports on crashes, please also include a stack trace.

If you experience crashes whenever you try to start gimp-1.3, you are most
probably using gdkxft or another LD_PRELOAD hack designed for gtk+-1.2. These
hacks will not work with GTK+-2.0 applications like this version of The GIMP.


Have fun,

  Spencer Kimball
  Peter Mattis
  Federico Mena
  Manish Singh
  Sven Neumann
  Michael Natterer