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. This includes the Perl extension and thus 
all the perl plug-ins. There is no working text tool 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