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Now I remembered what I wanted to say earlier. I can't remember in response to whom exactly, but here goes.
"Save must record everything that is part of the document; that is the law." That law also works in reverse. If you write to a file format that cannot support everything in the open image (i.e. any format but XCF), this means the open image contains still-unsaved elements, and thus, the image as a whole is still dirty. In GIMP 2.6, the only situation in which you lost work by saving a file as a non-XCF is if you saved and quit without saving an XCF copy in the meantime. It is not the saving vs. export that resulted in loss of work, it was GIMP wiping the image state clean again regardless of whether or not everything in the open image was stored on disk. Consider what happens in 2.6 if an image is first saved as XCF, some changes are made, then saved as a PNG. If you "Save A Copy..." as PNG, then: -> current image still associated with the XCF file, not the PNG -> current image still dirty. -> GIMP asks to save changes to the associated (XCF) file But if you "Save As..." PNG, then: -> current image becomes associated with the PNG file -> current image marked clean -> GIMP does not ask to save changes -> Even if GIMP does, it saves changes to the PNG file, not the XCF And it is easy to see how this can become a problem. In 2.8, an image's clean/dirty state is decided only in respect to saving as an XCF. If you saved an XCF then quit, everything's good, no lost work, XCF contains everything (even the current selection!). If you export and quit, whether you're losing any work that couldn't be written to the desired file format is on your head alone, GIMP is not responsible for that, but GIMP asks anyway just to be on the safe side, because only by saving as an XCF can it be guaranteed that absolutely nothing in the current session will be lost if the image is closed. So if we evaluate the (improbable) hypothesis where the Save and Export functionality is expressed using a single set of menu commands (as in 2.6), it should also hold true that (as in 2.8) only saving as an XCF will clean the image state. If you save to a non-XCF file and quit, the image is still dirty and GIMP must still ask whether to save changes. In XCF. Only XCF is guaranteed to save all data. But this creates a logical inconsistency where if the Save filepicker appears in the context of selecting it from the menu you can select any format (as in 2.6) but if it appears in the context of a close/quit prompt the only format available is XCF? -- Stratadrake strata_ranger hotmail com -------------------- Numbers may not lie, but neither do they tell the whole truth. |