Leonard Rosenthol <leonardr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > Why would adding support for XCF to ImageMagick be "a bad > idea and wasted time and effort"? Because XCF is changing? Because > GIMP users would use GIMP to convert image formats? Because no one > really uses XCF as a file format?
(1) Because the XCF format may change at any time and will do so sooner or later.
Don't you have to maintain backwards compatibility with your own user base? I certainly expect that you will change things to support new features (CMYK, etc.), but since old GIMP users have to be able to read those files, your changes would have to be backwards compat.
(2) Because to mimick the way GIMP projects its layers and channels
you have to implement all layer modes which boils down to copying
or reimplementing a lot of code from The GIMP. This will become
worse as soon as XCF will be extended to handle text and effect
layers. You will end up either rewriting or copying the GIMP core.
We have to do a lot of that anyway to support other image formats such as Photoshop, so there isn't anything "GIMP specific" in the areas of layer compositing and such. It's mostly an issue of converting from your internal representations (like tiles) to our "raw bitmaps", your properties to our structures, etc.
But yes, GIMP will always do a better job!
(3) Because GIMP can export it's images in a whole bunch of formats
ImageMagick and other programs can handle perfectly well.
True, but then you lose information and you have two copies of the image on your disk. For example, lets say that GIMP user wants to place an image they are working on in an AbiWord document. To do that before my changes to ImageMagick, they would have to export it as PNG and then import that (and hopefully remember to delete the copy!). Now, since AbiWord supports image importing through ImageMagick, it can just read the original XCF file! OR what about all the "web image gallery" software products that use ImageMagick to produce the thumbnails - now users of GIMP don't have to convert before running.
Also, if other applications can't read your file format, it doesn't help you propagate XCF as a "standard". Of course, maybe that's not your intent. Since GIMP only runs on GNOME-based Unix systems today (modulo the older Windows version and the hacks for Mac OS X), it means that your images aren't usable anywhere else! Posting them, putting them on CD's, etc. becomes pretty xenophobic. Applications like ImageMagick that run on other OS's can help XCF become a viable option for image distribution.
But then, you are free to do whatever you like and I will certainly not throw stones into your way.
Appreciated. But it does sound like you'd also not be interested in my adding XCF writing support to ImageMagick then either??! (which is fine, I have other things to work on ;).
Leonard
