Re: [Gimp-user] Can't get "Themes" to work

[Kevin Payne <paynekj hotmail com>]

I have interleaved some responses

Kevin

> Date: Fri, 10 Jul 2015 22:39:35 +0200
> From: forums gimpusers com
> To: gimp-user-list gnome org
> CC: notifications gimpusers com
> Subject: [Gimp-user] Can't get "Themes" to work

> Using GIMP 2.8.6 on a Windows 7 64 bit machine

Is there a reason you're not using the latest version- 2.8.14 ?

> Anyway, thought I'd give "themes" a try,  and as you can see from the attached
> file have a number of themes present   in the c:\Program files\GIMP
> 2\share\gimp\2.0\themes directory (as online sources state is necessary).

It's generally considered a bad idea to put extras in the GIMP system directory - they should be in your 
personal GIMP directory: C:\users\your-username\.gimp-2.8

> BUT,  no change results from selecting any of them and then clicking on "OK", 
> it doesn't matter if I shut down GIMP or not. All I get is the default theme.

You do have to re-start GIMP to get the theme to be used.

> 1. what am I missing/ doing wrong?  Is there some *.dll file that I need  to
> obtain and insert into a   particular directory?

That depends on the theme in question - some use particular GTK Theme engines and as the Windows version of 
GIMP only ships with a single theme engine (pixmap) some may not work as expected without finding and 
installing the appropriate engine.

> 2. Are the Various and sundry GIMP themes that are available safe to use on my
> PC. The potential for malware concerns me since no add-on themes seem to be
> available from the gimp.org  distribution. Are there gimp themes that are
> considered"trusted source" by the community?

I've not heard of any malicious themes, but others may be able to answer that better than me.

> As a postscript, I need to mention that when I was trying to use an automatic
> installer ( the "GIMP THEMES 1.0"  product) the install routine kept insisting
> that I use " C:\Program Files (X86)\GIMP 2"  as  the install-to location, when
> in fact there is no such animal on my machine, and manually changing the
> "install-to"  location in the box provided to the correct location had no
> effect. The install routine created  it's own directory in the C:\Program Files
> (X86) directory regardless of my efforts to change it.

I have no idea what that is, and question the need for an installer - themes generally come as a compressed 
archive (.zip, 7z etc) that you uncompress into your personal themes directory.

I recommend you take this up on one of the GIMP forums (gimpchat.com or gimpforums.com) as there's plenty of 
people who can help.

Kevin