[gimp-web] content: initial draft/plan for the GIMP 2.99.12 news.

From: Jehan <jehanp src gnome org>
To: commits-list gnome org
Cc:
Subject: [gimp-web] content: initial draft/plan for the GIMP 2.99.12 news.
Date: Tue, 23 Aug 2022 14:41:53 +0000 (UTC)
commit 3b0d6300c9c71ee730b298246495e7411043c840
Author: Jehan <jehan girinstud io>
Date:   Tue Aug 23 16:37:47 2022 +0200

    content: initial draft/plan for the GIMP 2.99.12 news.
    
    Please everyone, feel free to help and complete many of the empty
    sections. I added TODOs and links to redirect you to various reports or
    MRs where information can be used from.

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+Title: Development version: GIMP 2.99.12 Released
+Date: 2022-08-24
+Category: News
+Authors: Wilber
+Slug: gimp-2-99-12-released
+Summary: Release news for development version GIMP 2.99.12
+Image: gimp-2-99-10-20220221-experiments.jpg
+
+GIMP 2.99.12 is a huge milestone towards GIMP 3.0. Many of the missing
+pieces are getting together, even though it is still work in progress.
+As usual, issues are expected and possibly in particular in this release
+which got important changes in major areas, such as canvas interaction
+code, scripts, but also theming…
+
+The most noteworthy changes are listed below:
+
+[TOC]
+
+To get a more complete list of changes, you should refer to the
+[NEWS](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/blob/02739dd6e61b622577d94657949b20c68b51ed8e/NEWS#L9)
+file or look at the [commit
+history](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/commits/master).
+
+## Core Features
+### On-canvas brush sizing
+
+There were discussions for quickly changing tool settings on-canvas,
+without having to go to the "Tool Options" dockable, such as changing
+brush size or tool opacity.
+
+A quickly appearing on-canvas GUI was considered (similar to other
+software), but we realized that many people who want this actually
+prefer a non workflow-disruptive interaction.
+So we went for direct and quick brush size change for instance.
+
+TODO: explain how it works and small animated image.
+
+Note that there are still work-in-progress in this area. There are also
+interactions worked on, such as opacity update and even much more (see
+[next section](#customizable-on-canvas-modifiers)); right now it doesn't
+feel exactly right.
+
+Moreover if you have any issue with canvas interaction, this is a good
+time to report them because a lot of work went into making the code more
+generic so early-tester bugs are expected.
+
+### Customizable on-canvas modifiers
+
+Many features are available on-canvas, some of them less known than
+others, for padding on, or rotating the canvas ([since GIMP
+2.10.0](https://www.gimp.org/release-notes/gimp-2.10.html#digital-painting-improvements))
+or even selecting layers through canvas ([since GIMP
+2.10.10](https://www.gimp.org/news/2019/04/07/gimp-2-10-10-released/#on-canvas-layer-selection)).
+
+The current features are:
+
+| Modifiers    | Main button     | Secondary button (usually middle click) | Third Button (right click) |
+| ------------ | -----------     | --------------------------------------- | -------------------------- |
+| -            | *Tool-specific* | Panning                                 | Contextual menu            |
+| `Ctrl`       | *Tool-specific* | Zoom                                    | -                          |
+| `Shift`      | *Tool-specific* | Canvas rotation                         | -                          |
+| `Shift-Ctrl` | *Tool-specific* | Constrained (15°) canvas rotation       | -                          |
+| `Alt`        | *Tool-specific* | Layer picking                           | Resize brush 
([new](#on-canvas-brush-sizing)) |
+
+
+These are based on the following logic:
+
+* the main button is reserved for tools. Even though some of them share
+  similar logic (e.g. all the selection tools have similar modifier use
+  to add/subtract/intersect selections), some may have pretty unique
+  need. So the tool does not touch this private area
+* Then the secondary button was used for "navigation", in particular
+  canvas navigation, but even on some kind of `z` axis with layer
+  navigation with the recent Layer picking.
+* The third button was always quite unique for the contextual menu. The
+  new tool settings edit ability was added there as a default.
+
+As we added new features, it became obvious that we were eventually
+going to lack enough identifiers for other useful actions. Also everyone
+is different and have different workflows so some people would
+definitely prefer to have slightly different action behavior. As an
+example, even the [just implemented brush
+sizing](#on-canvas-brush-sizing) already comes in 2 variants.
+
+Not to mention it was starting to get crowded and we had feedbacks
+lately of people disliking some canvas actions happening unexpectedly,
+for instance because they hit `Shift` too early and a canvas rotation
+happens (and admittedly not anyone care about having canvas rotation in
+their workflow).
+Some legacy actions, such as a contextual menu on right click can also
+be questionable nowadays (especially as it is the same menu available
+at the top of the window).
+
+This is why the canvas interaction code got re-factored to use
+customizable modifiers rather than hard-coded. The whole table above is
+still the default, but now you may switch modifiers, change them
+completely, add more actions, remove some.
+
+Not only this, but you can now add any custom "action", i.e. anything to
+which you could assign a shortcut. Want to swap the
+foreground/background color on `right click`? You can now. Want to
+activate the brush tool with `Shift-right click`? You can too. As any
+other action on any other combination of modifier and input pointer
+button.
+
+Not only this, but it should work with any button (not only the second
+and third). So if you have a mouse with 20 buttons, you could map every
+one of them to an action (as well as any combination with modifiers).
+
+Furthermore it will recognize different input devices, so that you can
+map different actions to the same button of several plugged mice or
+styli (note that it doesn't recognize yet different device of the exact
+same model, but eventually it probably will).
+
+### Testing new Zoom behaviors
+
+TODO: add info about the new Preferences settings by woob.
+
+### Improved tool pointers
+
+### Improving again the "Fill by line art detection" of Bucket Fill tool
+
+### Welcome Dialog
+
+Remember the "[Welcome
+dialog](https://www.gimp.org/news/2022/02/25/gimp-2-99-10-released/#welcome-dialog)"
+which you get after an update (you probably got one in GIMP 2.99.12)? We
+worked a bit on the release note tab to allow for "demo" items.
+
+TODO: animated image + info that more is to be done. It's still WIP.
+
+## CMYK
+
+This one deserved a section on its own in this news report because
+thanks to our new [GSoC student](), things moved quite fast here, not
+only for CMYK, but for the color space invasion project as a whole. We
+had to re-think a lot of the color exchanges in various parts of the
+program.
+
+### Simulation data is now image data
+
+The main usage of "simulation" is soft-proofing, a very common use case
+being printing. E.g. you could work in a RGB space, but know the finale
+format (through a profile give to you by a printshop, often a CMYK
+profile) and want to see how your image would render, in particular
+check gamut loss.
+
+It was already possible to set a "Soft proof profile", as well as a
+rendering intent, and whether you wanted black point compensation or
+not. Yet this info was lost at each session restart.
+
+These data will now be stored within the XCF file itself. So you won't
+need to re-set them each time. Also if you do a specific print job, what
+the finale target is can anyway be considered part of the image.
+
+As a consequence, these moved from the `View > Color management` menu to
+the `Image > Color management` menu (though `View > Color management`
+still contains some settings, such as whether to enable color management
+and whether or not to soft-proof. These are not image data but specific
+to a view (a same image can be simultaneously displayed in several
+views, one proofed and the other not, for instance).
+
+### Simulation toggle in the status bas
+
+### Various GUI now simulation-aware
+
+TODO: the Color picker tool, sample points and Color selector are
+simulation-aware, i.e. that the CMYK values will use the soft-proof
+profile (if it is a CMYK profile).
+
+### Export formats with new or improved CMYK support
+
+TODO: JPEG, TIFF, PSD.
+
+### Improved API
+
+## Themes
+
+TODO: some screenshot of the new "Default" theme in both the light and
+dark variant. Thanks to Akkana Peck for her initial contribution of the
+light theme.
+
+## File format support
+### PSD
+### SVG
+### GIF
+### PNG
+### DDS
+### FLI
+### Raw data
+### New format: WBMP
+### New format: ANI
+
+## Script-fu
+
+TODO: a lot of work by Lloyd Konneker so it probably deserves its own
+section too.
+
+## API
+## Batch processing
+
+## Build and documentation
+
+### meson
+
+TODO: packager information, our meson build is now recommended for intensive testing.
+For this version, we released 2 tarballs (main one is meson) and INSTALL
+file was rewritten.
+
+### Gettext
+
+TODO: technical debt removed!
+Big work by Niels De Graef.
+
+## Platform support
+### Wayland
+
+TODO: check exactly, but:
+
+* we can probably talk about portal issues (X11 implementation of color
+  picking is not tried in priority even if the portals exist because of
+  broken portal on some desktops and non-color managed returned values)
+* We removed keyboard grab !530 (and more grab removal still WIP) which
+  were causing issues.
+* Some issues just disappeared by updating the dependency stack as
+  Wayland is still quite new technology with many small issues.
+
+### macOS
+
+TODO:
+
+* A lot of maintenance work done by Lukas Oberhuber. It's not always as
+  visible, but packaging work is quite thankless work so we should fix
+  this!
+* Also we should talk about the huge speed improvements which will
+  appear with GTK+ 3.24.35. We should probably also thank the GTK devs
+  (esp. John Ralls and Christian Hergert, as well as a few others who
+  intervene sporadically in bug reports) which patiently helped and made
+  a lot of iterations (through several MRs) to get it right. And
+  apparently they did as now macOS GIMP is seriously fast (according to
+  lukaso feedback, I haven't tested myself).  See gimp-macos-build!86
+  then gtk!4071, gtk!4427 and finally gtk!4728.
+  https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3714#note_1459718
+* There is also a Cairo update/patch we included, as I was told Inkscape
+  did it and it helps for slowness (though not sure if it helps as much
+  as the GTK ones): gimp-macos-build#38
+* For M1, work is still ongoing, but we are mostly blocked by hardware
+  (cf.  Infrastructure#832).
+
+## babl and GEGL
+
+As usual, this release is supplemented with the releases of
+[babl](https://gegl.org/babl/) 0.1.94 and [GEGL](https://gegl.org/)
+0.4.38.
+
+TODO:
+
+* check the NEWS file for both release.
+* Some demo usage of the new `babl` CLI tool are in order.
+* There might be a new babl release because the tarball is broken. If
+  not, just redirect packagers to this patch:
+  https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/babl/-/commit/626a9f5044e02b0360762c1b4ad24eaf412beefc.patch
+
+## Team news
+
+[Aryeom](https://film.zemarmot.net/en/#team) got reporter access to gimp
+and gimp-web to help with various design-related issues.
+
+Daniel Novomeský, maintainer of our JPEG-XL and HEIF/AVIF plug-ins, has
+been given access right to our flathub repository (for our stable and
+development flatpak) to help with maintenance.
+
+We'd like to thank a category of contributors who are historically not
+much in the light: release testers. Recently in particular, as we are
+really working on our [continuous integration and release
+process](https://www.gimp.org/news/2021/10/20/gimp-2-99-8-released/#continuous-integration-changes),
+we also try to improve manual verifications before release. Users are
+very welcome to discuss with us and hang out on our discussion channels
+during release frenzy to test the final builds.
+
+For our Windows installer, additionally to packagers (Jernej Simončič)
+and developers (Jacob Boerema), we want to thank
+[Sevenix](https://www.deviantart.com/sevenics) for having always been
+on-call, testing our installers for a few releases now. Sevenix also
+helps us to administer our recent [Discord
+server](https://www.gimp.org/discuss.html#discord).
+
+This is true for the Linux flatpak and the macOS DMG as well, as in
+these case, only their packagers (respectively Jehan and Lukas
+Oberhuber) have been testing them before release these days. So whatever
+is your platform of choice, please join us!
+
+So it's a good reminder that you don't need to be a developer to
+contribute back. There are tasks for packagers, testers, translators,
+documenters and more! 🤗
+
+## Websites
+### gimp-help
+
+TODO: talk about the new website with daily update, though we don't need
+to go in details, as it deserves its own news which we should do soon
+(possibly with a gimp-help tagged release?).
+
+### gimp-web-devel
+
+TODO: WIP for the new developer website, with a lot of help by swift and
+patdavid. Hugo port already done in-repo. Developer documentation from
+the old (lost) wiki as well as from within GIMP repository are going to
+be progressively migrated.
+Not online yet!
+
+## Mirror news
+
+A new
+[mirror](https://www.gimp.org/donating/sponsors.html#official-mirrors)
+joined us to distribute GIMP.
+
+Thanks to *SandyRiver.NET* in Pikeville, Kentucky USA, for sharing the
+download load!
+
+## Book news
+
+Three German books and three Polish books about GIMP have been added to
+the [books page](https://www.gimp.org/books/):
+
+* [*GIMP. Niesamowite efekty*, by Błażej Witkowski
+  (2019)](https://www.gimp.org/books/#gimp-niesamowite-efekty)
+* [*GIMP. Poznaj świat grafiki komputerowej*, by Błażej Witkowski
+  (2019)](https://www.gimp.org/books/#gimp-poznaj-swiat-grafiki-komputerowej)
+* [*Fotografia cyfrowa, Obsługa programu GIMP*, by Jadwiga Pawluk
+  (2012)](https://www.gimp.org/books/#fotografia-cyfrowa-obsuga-programu-gimp)
+* [*GIMP 2.10. Das umfassende Handbuch*, by Jürgen Wolf
+  (2019)](https://www.gimp.org/books/#gimp-210-das-umfassende-handbuch)
+* [*Bildbearbeitung mit GIMP 2.10 leicht gemacht. Der praktische Einstieg*, by Robert Klaßen
+  (2018)](https://www.gimp.org/books/#bildbearbeitung-mit-gimp-210-leicht-gemacht-der-praktische-einstieg)
+* [*GIMP 2.8*, by Bettina K. Lechner
+  (2014)](https://www.gimp.org/books/#gimp-28)
+
+We remind that we welcome book additions. Whether you wrote it or just
+read it, if you know of a book about GIMP, just [report the same
+information as other books list](https://gitlab.gnome.org/Infrastructure/gimp-web/-/issues/new).
+Thanks!
+
+## Release stats
+
+TODO: compile some stats.
+
+## Downloading GIMP 2.99.12
+
+As usual, GIMP 2.99.12 is available on [GIMP official website
+(gimp.org)](https://www.gimp.org/downloads/devel/) in 3 package formats:
+
+* Linux development flatpak
+* Windows installer
+* macOS DMG package
+
+Other packages made by third-party are obviously expected to follow
+(Linux or \*BSD distributions' packages, etc.).
+
+## What's next
+
+TODO: some final text.
+
+Don't forget you can [donate to the project and personally fund several
+GIMP developers](https://www.gimp.org/donating/), as a way to give back
+and accelerate the development of GIMP. As you know, the [maintainers of
+GEGL and GIMP are crowdfunding to be able to work full-time on free
+software](https://www.gimp.org/news/2021/07/27/support-gimp-developers-sustainable-development/). 🥳
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