On 12/18/2009 01:41 PM, Michael J. Hammel wrote:
> On Fri, 2009-12-18 at 13:15 -0500, Jay Smith wrote:
>> Thank you very much for the procedure suggestion. Really Cool!! I will
>> experiment with that. How would I have known that? Maybe I should
>> RTFM? But.....
>
> Maybe the manual mentions this. Maybe not. That's the way of
> documentation (even with commercial apps). There are always tricks to
> doing things with software. You learn by doing. Experimentation is
> king. 'Course, asking on mailing lists and forums doesn't hurt.
>
>> However, regarding your first paragraph, I understand what you are
>> saying and do not argue with it. My point is that you are saying is NOT
>> what the program says because in order to "flatten" it using the menu
>> system (other than dragging the window larger and double clicking) I
>> have to go to LAYER, ANCHOR LAYER.
>
> Actually, you can also use the Layers menu in the Layers dialog - right
> click on the floating selection (or any layer) to see it.
>
>> See the terminology confusion?
>
> Sure. But I ignore it. They say "tomaeto", I say "tomahto". Doesn't
> change what you have to do to make it work. Don't get too hung up on
> terminology. Spoils the fun. ;-)
>
> I suppose they could say "Anchor To Layer" instead. Feel free to
> suggest it to the developers or the documentation project. Or maybe the
> floating selection should be referred to as a floating layer instead. I
> often refer to the "image window" as the "canvas window" in my articles
> and books. I believe the term "image" is highly overused and a
> potential source of confusion too.
>
> All you have to do is convince everyone to say the same thing every time
> the reference something. Good luck. :-)
Hi Michael,
I am left wondering if I have still failed to communicate the basic
point I was trying to make.
I will give it one more short go, but at the risk of annoying Sven any
further and wasting everybody's time, I should stop there.
However, I must *extremely strongly* disagree with you regarding use of
terminology. It is all we have to communicate clearly about such
things. To a new user, it is absolutely critical -- I know that this is
a "professional level" program, etc., but even a highly skilled new user
is bombarded with new & different terminology in Gimp compared to other
programs they may have used and they are dealing with a user interface
which may not be familiar. I have only been using high-level image
editing programs for production work for 15 years but I struggled with
Gimp for the first few months I used it -- a lot of that struggle was
due to terminology and the "quirks" of the user interface. I remember,
back in the day, when I was a newbie starting to use PhotoShop -- I felt
no such sense of struggle; everything just flowed and seemed natural.
Maybe that experience (and use of non-Gimp terminology, etc.) ruined me
for Gimp -- BUT, I would guess that most Gimp new users are going to now
come from other programs and they will not be image-program virgins.
I am pushing my company hard toward linux as desktop. (I know that Gimp
is NOT a linux program, per se, but it is a leading application for
linux users and its challenges in the linux desktop parallels some of
the other linux desktop challenges due in part to the methods by which
it is developed.) This push is a struggle because there are still large
number of linux apps that are just (still!) not yet ready for the
mainstream desktop. And these issues have everything to do with mundane
and tedious-for-some-developers things like user interface and
consistency of menu terminology, consistency of style in open file
dialogs, etc., etc. Working on this stuff is probably neither fun nor
sexy. However, IMHO, it is an extremely important step toward wider
adaption of linux as desktop and toward ever-increasing success for Gimp.
a) *You* originally made the point out that a Floating Selection is a
Floating Selection and is *not* really a Layer. I am much more in
agreement with your more recent statement that perhaps there could be
more consistency in calling it a selection vs a layer, etc. There are
two, or maybe three, places in the menu that it could be. Layer, Anchor
Layer was the least obvious *to me.*
b) *You* also originally made the point that until the Floating
Selection is anchored, the image cannot be flattened. Here I disagree
-- from a USER's rather limited point of view. The user does not much
care what is under the hood, the user just wants the newly pasted in
content flattened into the layer onto which it was pasted -- by whatever
means or terminology it takes. Yet the menu system (whether top bar or
right click) makes you anchor it first before you can flatten it -- BUT
and this is a big point -- in this situation anchoring it DOES flatten
it. I understand that there certainly could be many layers, so one
probably does not want to flatten the entire image into a single layer.
However, this is still quite awkward and does not seem to be as
efficient as perhaps it could be.
c) Nobody has said anything about the other -- very important in my
opinion -- aspect of all of this...
- Double clicking the image itself does not anchor the selection.
- In order to anchor the selection by double clicking, one must
double click on the surrounding "outside the canvas" background,
BUT when the image is created in the manner I described, one
first has to drag the window larger (or somehow get some "outside
the canvas" background visible, to get to such background on which
to double click.
That just seems to make more work and then leads us into the
conversation above.
I'm done now, unless I am invited to continue.
Jay
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