[gimp-web/testing] news: draft of 2.9.8 release notes, without screenshots, videos, and outro section

[Alexandre Prokoudine <aprokoudine src gnome org>]

commit 7f7d01cb15297e0d0d608cfcede7c9353de4d765
Author: Alexandre Prokoudine <alexandre prokoudine gmail com>
Date:   Tue Dec 5 01:27:27 2017 +0300

    news: draft of 2.9.8 release notes, without screenshots, videos, and outro section

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+Title: GIMP 2.9.8 Released
+Date: 2017-12-XX
+Category: News
+Authors: Alexandre Prokoudine
+Slug: gimp-2-9-8-released
+Summary: GIMP 2.9.8 introduces on-canvas gradient editing and various
+enhancements while focusing on bugfixing and stability.
+
+Newly released GIMP 2.9.8 introduces on-canvas gradient editing and various
+enhancements while focusing on bugfixing and stability. For a complete list of
+changes please see [NEWS](https://git.gnome.org/browse/gimp/tree/NEWS).
+
+## On-Canvas Gradient Editing
+
+One of the most user-visible changes in 2.9.8 is the updated Blend tool.
+Here's what's new about it.
+
+First of all, it pretty much eliminates the need for the old Gradient Editor
+dialog, as all of the dialog's features are now available directly on the
+canvas. You can create and delete color stops, select and shift them, assign
+colors to color stops, change blending and coloring for segments between color
+stops, create new color stops from midpoints.
+
+-- [missing video from Ell] --
+
+Secondly, default gradients are now "editable". As you probably know, the
+reason most resources such as brushes, painting dynamics, and gradients are not
+direclty editable is that they are typically installed into a system directory
+where non-privileged user can't make any changes.
+
+Now when you try to change an existing gradient from a system folder, GIMP will
+create a copy of it, call it a 'Custom Gradient' and preserve it across
+sessions. Unless, of course, you edit another 'system' gradient, in which case
+it will become the new custom gradient.
+
+Since this feature is useful for more than just gradients, it was made generic
+enough to be used for brushes and other types of resources in the future.
+We expect to revisit this in the future releases of GIMP.
+
+<figure>
+    <img src="{filename}gimp-2-9-8-on-canvas-gradient.png" alt="Editing a gradient fill on the canvas" 
width='FIXME' height='FIXME' />
+</figure>
+
+
+Now that 2.9.8 is out with the updated Blend tool, we are interested in your
+feedback, as we still expect some cleanup and enhancements to be done there.
+
+Most of the programming was done by _Ell_, however we also want to acknowledge
+two other people who contributed to that effort one way or another.
+
+_Michael Henning_ improved the Blend tool for 2.9.2, making the position of its
+endpoints editable before applying the gradient fill.
+
+_Michael Natterer_ refactored source code of GIMP's tools to make them reuse one
+another's on-canvas handles. That greatly simplified adding on-canvas handles
+for color stops. He also added the generic on-canvas dialog with the most
+important options for tools.
+
+## Clip Warning
+
+_Ell_ also implemented a feature request made in our public mailing list,
+where Elle Stone asked for some way to visualize underexposed and overexposed
+areas of a photo — a common feature in digital photography tools such as
+darktable and RawTherapee.
+
+The new _Clip Warning_ display filter targets that use case and fills
+underexposed and overexposed areas with user-configurable colors. For now,
+it's mostly geared towards images where colors are stored with floating point
+precision. You will mostly benefit from this, if you work on 16/32 bit per
+channel float images such as EXR and TIFF.
+
+-- [video from alexandre] --
+
+Implementing this feature as a display filter has certain disadvantages such
+as having to go through the whole routine of adding a display filter for every
+image. We are thinking of better ways to do this.
+
+## Color Management
+
+GIMP now uses the babl library for doing conversion of images between color
+spaces when matrix-based ICC profiles are used. This leads to completing
+transforms ca. 5 times faster in comparison to LittleCMS v2 on a few test
+images we tried this on. We expect to make further use of babl for doing color
+transforms once the library supports ICC profiles based on lookup tables.
+
+## Paste in Place
+
+Michael Natterer implemented another small feature request from a user who
+asked for an Inkscape-like _Paste in Place_ command. The idea is that GIMP
+should be able to paste contents of the clipboard at exact coordinates the
+contents was originally copied from. This feature is available for both the
+regular clipboard and named buffers.
+
+-- [missing screenshot from alexandre] --
+
+_Paste in Place_ complements the usual 'Paste' command which places contents
+of the clipboard into the center of the viewport.
+
+## GUI and Usability
+
+The spinscale widget now highlights vertical parts of the slider section
+differently to hint that position of cursor above the widget matters.
+When changing values in the lower step section, the pointer will be wrapped
+around the screen so that you could continue adjusting the value without
+interruptions.
+
+When using transform tools, you can now press a modifier key before or after
+pressing/releasing a mouse button.
+
+The _Info_ window for the color picker now remembers the modes across session.
+So if you prefer seeing LAB values, that's what you will see every time until
+you choose something else.
+
+Canvas rotation and flip information is now visible in the status bar, as angle
+and flip icons. Clicking on these canvas status will respectively raise the
+_Select Rotation Angle_ dialog or unflip the canvas.
+
+## Improved Wavelet Decompose Filter
+
+The much demanded _Wavelet Decompose_ filter got a small round of updates
+and gained a couple of new options: placing decomposition stack into its own
+layer group and adding a layer mask to each scales layers. It also produces
+more expected results now.
+
+## Translations
+
+Translation of GIMP was updated for 13 languages: Catalan, Croatian, Galician,
+German, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Polish, Russian,
+Spanish, and Swedish.
+
+## What's Next
+
+FIXME
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