472 CHAPTER 12 ADDITIONAL TOPICS Not through (Best web hosting)

May 7th, 2008

472 CHAPTER 12 ADDITIONAL TOPICS Not through the Preferences window, but you can if you re willing to edit gtkrc. (If you don t already have a gtkrc file in your GIMP profile folder, you can create a new one with your text editor.) Add some lines like this: style “gimp-large-preview” { GimpPreview::size = 350 } class “GimpPreview” style “gimp-large-preview” In place of 350, put whatever size you want your previews to be. The default is 200. You don t have to use the name gimp-large-preview; any name will do. As with most configuration file changes, you ll have to restart GIMP to see this change (Figure 12-7). Figure 12-7. Increase the preview size as much as you like. GIMP s Window Positions and Configuration: sessionrc The GIMP remembers the positions of your windows, so you can stow the Toolbox on one side of the screen and the Layers dialog on the other. It stores this information in the sessionrc file. You will seldom need to touch this file. But this is the place to look if you have a problem with your window positions, or with the preview sizes in dockables like Layers. You can edit these values directly in sessionrc. Don t edit this file while GIMP is running, though, or GIMP will probably overwrite your changes.
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CHAPTER 12 ADDITIONAL (Free web design) TOPICS 471 You can

May 7th, 2008

CHAPTER 12 ADDITIONAL TOPICS 471 You can include multiple folders by using a colon between the names. ${gimp_dir}refers to your personal gimprc directory, and ${gimp_data_dir} to the GIMP system directory where these plug-ins are stored. Changing Preview Sizes with gtkrc You may remember from installing GIMP that it s built upon a user interface library called GTK, the Gimp ToolKit. GTK s numerous configuration options can be set globally, but you can also set options for specific applications that take precedence over the global settings. GIMP s GTK settings reside in a file called gtkrc in your GIMP profile folder. Most of the time, this file will be updated automatically to reflect changes you make in your GIMP user interface. But there are a few cases where it s helpful to view the file. The most important use of gtkrc is to change the preview size in plug-in dialogs. You may have puzzled over the two Preview Size options in the Interfaces category of Preferences. When you change the size, the previews in plug-in windows don t change. Why not? The two options in Preferences affect different previews. Default layer & channel preview size controls the size of the preview thumbnails shown in each line of the Layers dialog. But they re tricky to use: GIMP doesn t actually honor them unless you close the tab, bring up the dialog again, and then re-dock it. It s much faster to ignore the preferences and change the preview sizes from the dockable s menu. (You can also change them by editing sessionrc, as you ll see shortly.) Navigation preview size controls the size of the window that pops up when you click on the navigation panner button at the bottom-right of an image window. So what about those plug-in previews? The normal preview size is pretty small and it s sometimes hard to see much (Figure 12-6). Can you make it bigger? Figure 12-6. GIMP s default preview size is a bit small.
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470 CHAPTER 12 ADDITIONAL TOPICS Saving Modified

May 6th, 2008

470 CHAPTER 12 ADDITIONAL TOPICS Saving Modified Images Usually, when you tell GIMP to save, it will save even if it thinks the image hasn t been modified. You can prevent this behavior if you like: (trust-dirty-flag yes) Help Browser on F1 You can disable the Help browser (for instance, if you don t have one installed and want to use F1 for something else): (use-help no) Help Locales Normally, GIMP should be able to figure out which language you use from your system s locale setting. If this doesn t work, though, you can specify it with help-locales. This is a colon-separated list. For instance, if you have US English plus a Great Britain locale that uses the UTF-8 character set, use the following: (help-locales “en_US:en_GB.UTF-8″) Restoring Keyboard Shortcuts The GIMP has a preference in the Interface category to Save keyboard shortcuts on exit (assuming you ve enabled dynamic keyboard shortcuts in the first place, of course). Naturally, GIMP will usually load your saved shortcuts whenever it starts. But if you don t want that to happen automatically, add this to your gimprc: (restore-accels no) In that case, GIMP will only load your customized key bindings when you go to the Interface category of the Preferences window and click on Reset Saved Keyboard Shortcuts to Default Values. Tear-Off Menus If for some reason you don t like the tear-off menus, you can disable them: (tearoff-menus no) Plug-In Paths You saw the Fractal Explorer, Gfig, Gflare, and GIMPressionist plug-ins in Chapter 7. You can set their data directories to something other than the default, or add additional directories: (fractalexplorer-path “${gimp_dir}/fractalexplorer:${gimp_data_dir}/fractalexplorer”) (gfig-path “${gimp_dir}/gfig:${gimp_data_dir}/gfig”) (gflare-path “${gimp_dir}/gflare:${gimp_data_dir}/gflare”) (gimpressionist-path “${gimp_dir}/gimpressionist:${gimp_data_dir}/gimpressionist”)
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CHAPTER 12 ADDITIONAL TOPICS 469 Stingy Memory (Web site developers)

May 5th, 2008

CHAPTER 12 ADDITIONAL TOPICS 469 Stingy Memory Use Any large program like the GIMP needs to make trade-offs between speed and memory usage. By default, GIMP will assume there s plenty of memory, and will optimize for speed. On a low- memory system, you may see better performance by setting: (stingy-memory-use yes) Default Brush, Pattern, Palette, Gradient, and Font The GIMP doesn t normally remember settings for these values (though some of them will be remembered if you chose Save tool options now from the Tool Options category of the Preferences window). But you can set them explicitly in gimprc, with lines such as the following: (default-brush “Circle (4)”) (default-pattern “Leopard”) (default-palette “Web”) (default-gradient “Full Saturation Spectrum CCW”) (default-font “Helvetica Bold Italic”) The names used in gimprc correspond to the names you see in the dialogs where you choose these items. Share Palette The Tool Options category of Preferences lets you share brushes, patterns, or gradients, among all tools. But the GIMP can also share fonts and palettes: (global-font yes) (global-palette yes) Perfect Mouse When you move the mouse quickly, computer systems may take a shortcut and pass only some of the positions to the application. This saves GIMP from needing to process every pixel that the mouse covers, and usually speeds up drawing. Normally, GIMP doesn t take this shortcut: it processes every pixel the mouse crosses. If you notice lags while drawing lines quickly, it might be worth experimenting with the perfect-mouse setting by changing it to no : (perfect-mouse no) Imperfection may be faster on some systems. Default Threshold Tools such as Fuzzy Select and Bucket Fill have a threshold for what constitutes a nearby region, settable in Tool Options. Normally, this defaults to 15, but you can change that: (default-threshold 10)
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468 CHAPTER (Cool web site) 12 ADDITIONAL TOPICS gimprc Most

May 3rd, 2008

468 CHAPTER 12 ADDITIONAL TOPICS gimprc Most of your saved preferences are stored in a file called gimprc. If you ve changed any preferences from the default, the file might include lines like these: # GIMP gimprc # # This is your personal gimprc file. Any variable defined in # this file takes precedence over the value defined in the # system-wide gimprc: /etc/gimp/2.0/gimprc # Most values can be set within The GIMP by changing some # options in the Preferences dialog. (interpolation-type lanczos) (default-font “Helvetica Bold Italic”) (default-image (width 500) (height 400) (unit pixels) (xresolution 72.000000) (yresolution 72.000000) (resolution-unit inches) (image-type rgb) (fill-type background-fill) (comment “Created with The GIMP”)) (undo-levels 11) (resize-windows-on-resize yes) You ll probably recognize most of the options as preferences that are settable in the Preferences window. But what s that default-font line? Try as you might, you won t be able to find a default font setting in the Preferences window. The GIMP can understand preferences beyond the ones exposed in the Preferences window, and editing gimprc is the way to set them. As with editing scripts or plug-ins, you should use a plain text editor to edit gimprc (or any other file inside your GIMP profile), not a word proces sor (Chapter 11, Why a Text Editor? , explains why). First, you ve probably already noticed that the syntax looks like Script-Fu: everything is delimited by parentheses. Options that take multiple values, such as the default-image settings, take a list of parenthesis-delimited lists. You may wonder about that comment referencing /etc/gimp/2.0/gimprc: why is it 2.0, and not 2.2 or 2.4? GIMP sometimes confusingly uses 2.0 to refer to resources such as plug- ins or preferences that can be used by any GIMP version starting with 2. Linux and Unix users can get the latest on gimprc by typing man gimprc into a terminal window (it also works on Macs if you used DarwinPorts to install the GIMP). This displays the manual page for gimprc, updated as of your current GIMP version, and should tell you all the latest options. On other platforms, or if you don t have the manual page installed, you can read it online at http://www.gimp.org/man/gimprc.html. How do you find out which options you can set in gimprc? Here are some of the highlights that aren t already accessible through the Preferences window.
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CHAPTER 12 ADDITIONAL TOPICS 467 Figure 12-5.

May 2nd, 2008

CHAPTER 12 ADDITIONAL TOPICS 467 Figure 12-5. A screen shot of a window is limited to the window s boundaries, even if menus are showing that extend beyond the boundaries. GIMP Configuration Files By now, you ve probably referenced your GIMP profile directory for some reason or other to install scripts or plug-ins, or to create new brushes or patterns. In addition, you ve probably fiddled with your preference settings through GIMP s Preference dialog. All these changes are saved inside your profile folder. But there s quite a bit more buried in there. Sometimes it s useful to examine your settings directly, or to change settings that aren t visible in the Preferences window. In addition, you can copy your profile folder from one machine to another if you want to make your GIMP settings available on a second machine. Remember, you can find your GIMP profile folder by opening the Preferences window (File . Preferences from the Toolbox window) and looking in the Folders category. Nearly every item in that category will have two entries: one for a system location, and one inside your profile folder. Take a look at your profile folder now as you go through its contents. All of the configuration files in your GIMP profile folder are readable text files (though there are other types of files there as well, such as C plug-ins, brushes, patterns, and so on). You can copy your whole GIMP profile, or any part of it, to another machine (though compiled C plug-ins may not work if you move them to a different platform).
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Web hosting service - 466 CHAPTER 12 ADDITIONAL TOPICS Figure 12-4.

May 2nd, 2008

466 CHAPTER 12 ADDITIONAL TOPICS Figure 12-4. The Screenshot dialog The options are all straightforward. You can take a shot of a single window, with or without its borders: click Grab, and then click on the window you want to shoot. Include window decoration controls whether the screen shot will include the window s frame and title bar. Or you can take a shot of your whole desktop. You can also choose Select a region in order to drag out a region of the desktop with the mouse. The Wait [0] seconds before grabbing is particularly useful if you need to perform an action in the window while the screen shot is happening. For example, if you want a shot of a window with a menu showing, you can set a delay of five seconds, click Grab, move to the target window and click to select it; then you have five seconds to pop up a menu. You can set the delay as long or as short as you like, depending on the difficulty of the operation (and the speed of the system). Since GIMP calls a system program to perform the actual screen shot, there are some limitations. For instance, on some systems, screen shots don t show the mouse cursor. If you need a screen shot showing a cursor, you ll have to cheat by getting a copy of the cursor image somewhere else and pasting it into your screen shot. Tip If you ever need GIMP s special cursors for a screen shot, the GIMP source includes a file called gimp-tool-cursors.xcf which includes all the cursors used in GIMP. Each part of each cursor is a separate layer, so you can combine them as needed. Screen shots of windows are usually limited to the window s own boundaries (Figure 12-5). If your menu goes beyond the boundaries of the window, you re better off shooting the whole desktop, or a region of the desktop (you ll have to guess how far the menus will extend). You can always crop off any extra. Certain types of windows, such as games that are using accelerated 3-D graphics, may not produce a screen shot that looks exactly like what you see. Finally, GIMP will shoot the content of windows as it appears on the screen. If your window is slightly off the screen, or is partially covered by another window, the screen shot will show that.
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CHAPTER 12 ADDITIONAL TOPICS 465 Screen Shots (Web hosting ecommerce)

May 1st, 2008

CHAPTER 12 ADDITIONAL TOPICS 465 Screen Shots and Scanners: the Acquire Menu Most of your work with GIMP will probably begin with existing images, such as photographs, or a blank canvas. But there s another way to obtain images: the File . Acquire menu. Acquire offers two seemingly unrelated functions: screen shots, and communication with devices such as scanners. But they both have something in common: GIMP needs to run a system program in order to import an image. The Acquire menu also offers Paste as New, which you ve probably already used in other contexts. It simply creates a new image out of whatever layer or selection has been most recently copied or cut. Scanning from GIMP If you don t have a scanner, only Screenshot will be available in the menu. If you have a scanner, you need two software pieces in order to scan directly to the GIMP: The driver for your scanner A scanning plug-in for the GIMP Scanner drivers use one of two common protocols: TWAIN or SANE. TWAIN is most commonly used on Windows systems, and is also popular on Mac. It s usually provided as part of the drivers shipped with a new scanner. The origin of the name is unclear: some say that it stands for Technology Without An Important Name, but people on the TWAIN committee say it comes from Kipling s phrase Never the twain shall meet, reflecting the previous difficulty of connecting scanners to computers. SANE is an open source protocol. It stands for Scanner Access Now Easy. It s commonly used on Linux and Mac systems, but it s available for Windows as an add-on. Its home page is http://www.sane-project.org/. Macs add one more menu entry, Image Capture…, which can grab images from a webcam, if you have one. Whichever protocol you use for your scanner, you will need an appropriate plug-in for the GIMP to find the scanner. For SANE, there s the xsane-gimp plug-in; for TWAIN, there s a Twain Acquire plug-in that should be part of the GIMP packages on Mac and Windows. Either of these plug-ins will create a new submenu inside the Acquire menu, called XSane or TWAIN Acquire. With your scanner turned on, check the contents of this menu. It may list the scanner there already, in which case the menu item will bring up a scanning dialog. Alternately, it may simply give you the option to bring up a device dialog, which will attempt to identify your scanner. Scanners are tricky beasts. Some scanners work perfectly out of the box, but others require help. You may have to fiddle with your scanner setup to make it show up as a TWAIN or SANE device. Possible issues with specific scanners are beyond the scope of this book. Screen Shots Screen shots are far less problematic than scanners, since there s no device driver to cause difficulties. File . Acquire . Screenshot… brings up the dialog shown in Figure 12-4.
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464 CHAPTER (Web hosting uk) 12 ADDITIONAL TOPICS Here is

April 30th, 2008

464 CHAPTER 12 ADDITIONAL TOPICS Here is where you adjust the brightness, contrast, and color balance of your prints. Every printer model is a little different. Some may emphasize one color or another; others may print too light or too dark, or have other problems. This isn t very important when you re printing out web maps and directions, or even fliers for your company picnic. But when you re making glossy photos to hang on your wall or give to relatives, it matters. To find out how your printer stacks up, you will probably have to experiment, printing several images and trying different settings. This can be slightly costly since you can use up ink and expensive paper. Fortunately, you don t need to print full-page images to test a printer: you can print small images, feed the same page through multiple times, and use the Gimp-Print position and size settings to place the image at a different location on the page each time. On a particularly tricky image, you might want to create a smaller test image that includes some of the extremes of the original. The Gutenprint plug-in allows still more adjustments. It gives you a list of presets, such as Mixed Text and Graphics (the default) or Line Art, but selecting Manual Control gives you a long list of every value you might possibly want to adjust. Most of them are grayed-out by default; try clicking the toggle button next to any item to enable it. Once you ve found settings that look the way you want them (which usually means that the printed image looks similar to the image you see on screen), you can Save Settings, and Gimp-Print will remember these settings next time. Each setting has a tooltip: to see it, hover over the text field for that setting. Some of the tricky ones are Density, Gamma, and Dither Algorithm. Density controls the amount of ink used for printing. Normally, this should not need adjustment, but if your prints come out with so much ink that it smears or soaks into the paper, or so little that black areas aren t fully black or colors seem faded, this is the place to adjust it. You met Gamma briefly in Chapter 2: it corresponds to the middle slider in the Levels dialog. Generally, gamma works like brightness: larger values mean a brighter print; smaller values mean a darker one. However, adjusting gamma won t change the levels of black or white in the image, only the middle tones in between. Dither Algorithm controls how the GIMP maps its internal RGB colors to the CMYK colors the printer understands. In addition, printing almost always involves some scaling: it s not likely that the number of pixels in your image will exactly match the number of dots your printer would use at the size you want the image to appear. Fortunately, the print software does a good job of scaling and color mapping. Most of the time, the default methods it uses are fine, but if you ever want to fine-tune the result, you can choose from a variety of algorithms: Adaptive Hybrid (the default), Ordered, Fast, Very Fast, Hybrid Floyd-Steinberg, or EvenTone. The Gimp-Print project recommends using Adaptive Hybrid for highest quality. That should be the default, and most of the time you can leave it alone. If you want to experiment with other settings, Ordered can work just as well and is faster for images with mostly continuous tones (no text or line art). Fast is faster, but at the expense of quality (Very Fast is more so, but it sacrifices more quality than most people will tolerate). You can get details on some of the other algorithms on the Gimp-Print website, gimp-print.sourceforge.net. Print to File Even if you don t have a printer connected to your GIMP machine, you can print to a PostScript file. In the Printer name menu at the top of Printer Settings, choose *File. You will be prompted for a file name. It s probably best to give the file a name with a .ps extension, so that every machine where you try to use it will recognize that it s PostScript.
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Web site template - CHAPTER 12 ADDITIONAL TOPICS 463 The Center

April 30th, 2008

CHAPTER 12 ADDITIONAL TOPICS 463 The Center buttons let you center the image Vertically, Horizontally, or Both. These buttons are particularly useful after adjusting Size, since you can re-center the image quickly. Making the Print: The Buttons at the Bottom Once you re happy with the paper and resolution settings and the photo s size and position on the page, you can make a print using the Print button. You also have the option of saving the settings you just defined for Size, Position, and Printer Settings by clicking on Save Settings, or you can do both at once using Print and Save Settings. Any settings you save will be remembered for future GIMP sessions. The other buttons Help, About, and Cancel are self-explanatory. Once you click on Print or Print and Save Settings, GIMP should begin sending data to the printer. At a high-resolution setting, this may take a while; watch the status bar at the bottom- right of the GIMP image window for progress. Fine-Tuning: Image/Output Settings Remember that Image/Output Settings tab that I skipped at the top of the Gimp-Print dialog? These settings let you fine-tune the brightness and color of the image, choosing from several presets. You can think of Line art as analogous to black-and-white drawings or text (2-bit color), Solid colors as analogous to indexed color (with areas over which the color is constant), and Photograph as 24-bit true color. If in doubt, leave at the default setting, Photograph. Output type is more useful. If you re printing a grayscale or black-and-white image, selecting the appropriate value will restrict your printer to only black ink. This may be cheaper, depending on the printer; certainly it looks different from a monochrome image printed with colored inks. Try both and see the difference. But the real power of the Image/Output Settings tab is the Adjust Output… button, which brings up the Print Color Adjust dialog shown in Figure 12-3. Figure 12-3. The Print Color Adjust dialog
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