About Babygimp

General

Description: An icon editor in Perl/Tk

Version: 0.41

Author: Christian Lederer

Contact: <christianlederer@web.de>

License: GPL

Changelog

(The version numbering is somewhat arbitrary.)

03.12.01: Version 0.41
Major changes::
- More flexible flood fill tool
- More gradient options
- Line angles may be restricted to 30 or 45 degrees
- Primitive smoothing tool replaced by Guassian blur
- Primitive filter added to remove isolated pixels
- Spray tool allows randomization
20.11.01: Version 0.4 pre
Changes:
- The palette can now be customized; it is also possible to have several palette files.
- Color selection mechanism changed.
- More flexible gradient tool
- GUI improved
- Bugfixes
22.05.01: Final release of version 0.31
Changes:
- Primitive smoothing tool added
- Manual updated
13.05.01: Version 0.3.1 prereleased.
Major changes:
- Importing and exporting to other formats than xpm is simplified now. One may specify external conversion programs (like convert from ImageMagick) which will automatically be called based on the image file extension. This is much more comfortable than exporting/importing via plugins like in version 0.3.
- Warp tool added.
- Minor changes in the gui and some code cleanup.
6.5.01: Version 0.3 released.
I still resisted the temptation to split Babygimp in several modules. This would make the programming much easier but require Babygimp to be installed. But i still think that small applications should be standlone ready to run files.

Major changes:
- Plugin support (! :-)))
- Tk::Fileselect replaced by a homebrew file selector which supports bookmarks and wildcharts.
- Timout added for loading and saving images. (In version 0.2 loading unknown file formats or even some gifs sometimes caused hangups. Also saving gifs with many colors sometimes resulted in hangups. This is due to a bug in the Tk::Photo method.)
  This was a bit tricky since the methods of Tk::Photo may crash (die) or hang up.
- Undoing is now limited since unlitited undo could be extremely memory consuming.
- Some minor optimisations, but loading large pixmaps is still slow.
- Explode/implode function removed since such effects are better done by plugins.
- Saving images restricted to xpm since the photo->data method (which was used before for saving gifs) is too buggy. Moreover one may use now exporter plugins.
- Filled ellipses drawing improved.
25.4.01: Version 0.2 released
Changes:
- Some minor Bugfixes
- New feature: radial gradients
- Preferences dialog added
- The documentation is now written in HTML and the help function calls an external browser
- Babygimp logo created :-))
15.4. 01: Version 0.1 released

Todo

Write a man page.
Try to make Babygimp faster and less resources consuming.
Implement a smarter undo function. Currently each time the image is changed the whole image is copied to the top of the undo stack and undoing copies the whole image back, even if only one pixel was changed.
General code cleanup !!!
Better detection of corrupted plugins.
Replace font seletion via xfontsel by a builtin font browser.
Automatic scrolling the drawing canvas when it is larger than its frame and the mouse reaches the border.
Add a formal parameter type to the plugin mechanism which enables to select from several alternatives.
Support for creating animated gifs via an extension of the plugin mechanism.
It should be possible to pipe the contents of the clipboard through a program like gifmerge. Perhaps one should have a second clipboard which is reserved for animation sequences.

History

Some time ago i switched from Windowmaker to Icewm which in my eyes is the best windowmanager for Linux on laptops. However i found the default icons for Icewm not very cool, so i wanted to create my own set.

I tried several icon editors (pixmap, kiconedit ...) but these did not have the functionality is needed and were too buggy. Of course i also used the Gimp, but i think it is nor very apt for editing small icons. When editing icons one will usually zoom in order to work on single pixels. But then one needs a preview where the changes are instantanlusly reflected. So finally i wrote my own icon editor in Perl/Tk (the only GUI i am familiar with).

The first (unpublished) version was somewhat bigger and split in several modules (and therefore needed some work to install). However finally i decided that Babygimp should be easy to install (should need no installation at all to be precise), so a packed everything into one single file which should be able to run on any Linux whith Perl/Tk installed. I really hate typing `make install' as root! Of course i have many ideas haw one could enhance the functionality of Babygimp (e.g. support for animated gifs). However i have not the time to do this, so i consider my work on Babygimp essentially as finished (apart bug fixes).

Credits

I would not been able to write this manual in a reasonable time without the amaya browser. I also want to mention some books from which i learned a lot about perl and which i strongly recommend to any perl programmer:

From Nancy Walshs Learning Perl/Tk i learned the basics.
I used may tricks which can be found in the Perl Cookbook from Tom Christiansen and Nathan Torkington, especially converning regular expressions.
From Sriram Srinivasans Advanced Perl Programming tought me to understand (hopefully) how closures work.

Sergey Pinaev not only complained that Babygimp 0.3 did not run with his Perl/Tk version but also sent me a patch. He also sent me a patch adding hotkeys to Babygimp. Unfortunately a had already started with Babygimp 0.3.1, so these patches will eventually be incorporated into later versions.

It is my intention that Babygimp should run with any Perl/Tk version on any Linux distribution without need for upgrading (or downgrading) or installing new packages (like PerlMagick). However currently i have only two systems available where i can test it: SuSE 6.3 at my home computer and SuSE 7.0 at my workplace. So please send me feedback!

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