On Thu, Jun 21, 2001 at 12:28:30PM +0300, Tuomas Kuosmanen wrote: > I personally have no clue what "Restart markers" or DCT method of "Fast > integer" means in practice. So maybe someone who knows can look into this, > and try to think what options are really necessary, and if there is really a > point in showing some of them to the user, how to label it so you dont need > to be a member of the Join Photographic Experts Group to know how to use the > save dialog :-) Education day! Restart markers make JPEG data more robust -- asking for more frequent restart markers will make less of the image corrupt if somehow the file is damaged. For day-to-day web use set it to the minimum because of course the markers increase size and small is beautiful. DCT method is a libjpeg specific option which chooses an algorithm for calculating the discrete cosine transform, depending on your hardware the floating point might be faster or slower - for big images you might try playing with this to decrease turn-around time. The default is OK on most PCs. > And yes, I am even a geek. There are users who are not. Gimp has a lot of > these obscure things, for example the TIFF save dialog: [skipped] > Now, I dont even know if there are any cases when you want to use a certain > setting, but if there is, it might be good to explain it a bit here somehow? If you don't use the right setting <Proprietary Application> and/ or <Code written by an Intern three years ago> will not load the TIFF, usually making wild claims like "This is not a TIFF" or just crashing <Proprietary Application> doesn't bother to tell you which setting to use because they don't expect you to use any software except from <Proprietary Vendor> and <Code written by Intern> doesn't tell you because the Intern didn't finish documenting it. Gimp cannot do anything about this, and all I can do is tell people to avoid TIFF unless it is absolutely the only solution short of rolling their own file format. > Also, speaking of TIFF plugin, if the LZW saving is not supported anymore, > it should be taken out as an option, instead have a small text label below > the choices saying what the popup dialog says: "Note: LZW compression is not > supported because of Unisys patent problems." or something. The patent problem is in libtiff. At libtiff compile time users who have a license from Unisys, or say that they don't need one will be given the option of including a working LZW codec in their build. It is not possible, right up until that dialog appears, to detect whether the user's libtiff does or does not include LZW. To a libtiff using app there is no difference between "Real LZW codec" and "LZW pseudo-codec which displays an error" -- Gimp only knows that an error occurred. Now - the material point of this thread. Yes, I would like to introduce an "Advanced..." option or setting and some way to configure file plug-ins without actually loading/ saving a file, like in PSP I think. Nick.
