Download title: GNU Image Manipulation Program subtitle: User Manual

What's New in The GIMP?
GIMP 1.0 evolved gradually into the very stable and widely used 1.2 release. Three years
later, as the GIMP development came closer to the next stable release, they decided that
the level of fundamental change to the inner workings of the program justified calling the
new stable version 2.0. GIMP 2.0.0 was released on March 23, 2004. For GIMP 2.2, the
developers aimed at a short cycle, adding a number of important features that did not
require instability-inducing low level changes. GIMP 2.2.0 was released on December 19,
2004. This section briefly describes the new features that were added in GIMP 2.2, as well
as the features that were introduced in GIMP 2.0.
Here is a brief summary of some of the most important new features introduced in GIMP
2.2. There are many other smaller changes that long-time users will notice and appreciate
(or complain about!). There are also important changes at the level of plugin
programming and script-fu creating that are not covered here.
Interoperability and standards support
• You can drag-and-drop or copy-and-paste image data from the GIMP to any
application which supports image/png drops (currently Abiword and Kword at least)
and image/xml+svg drops ( Inkscape supports this one). So you can copy-and-paste
curves into the GIMP from Inkscape, and then drag a selection into Abiword to
include it inline in your document.
• Patterns can now be any supported GtkPixbuf format, including png, jpeg, xbm and
others.
• GIMP can load gradients from SVG files, and palettes from ACT and RIFF files.
• Drag-and-drop support has been extended. You can now drop files and URIs onto an
image window, where they will be opened in the existing image as new layers.
Shortcut editor
You can now edit your shortcuts in a dedicated dialog, as well as continue to use the littleknown dynamic shortcuts feature (which has been there since 1.2).
Plug-in previews
Real-time previews of transform operations
The transform tools (shear, scale, perspective and rotate) can now show a real-time
preview of the result of the operation when the tool is in "Traditional" mode. Previously,
only a transforming grid was shown.
A lot of work has been done on making the GIMP's interface simpler and more usable for
newcomers. Most dialogs now follows the GNOME HIG to the best of our knowledge. In
addition, dialogs have separated out or removed many "Advanced" options, and replaced
them with sane defaults or hidden them in an expander.
GNU Image Manipulation Program
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G e n e r a t e d
b y
GNOME Human Interface Guide conformance
d o c b o o k 2 o d f
We have provided a standard preview widget for plug-in authors which greatly reduces
the amount of code required to support previews. David Odin has integrated this widget
into all the current filters, so that now many more filters in the GIMP include a preview
which updates in real time, and the various previews behave much more consistently.