Hi, here's another summary of what's happening in the HEAD branch, what do watch out for if you want to join development and where help is needed... Mitch has almost finished the port of the menus to GtkUIManager. The new code is in use now and seems to work fine. The only remaining regression is integration with the help system (pressing F1 on a menu item should call the relevant help pages). This is being worked on and will soon be reenabled. What's not yet working is global accelerators. The toolbox and the image window share accelerators already but it's not working from the dock windows yet. Mitch says we will need some ugly hacks to get it working :( In order to avoid duplications in the menu XML files, I've added some Makefile rules that call xsltproc to generate some of the XML files. So if you want to edit the menu hierarchy, keep an eye on the first lines of the XML file you are about to edit. If it's a generated file, there's a comment telling you so. You need to edit the respective foo.xml.in file then. This also means that xsltproc is now needed to build GIMP from CVS. The tarball will contain the generated files so this is solely a requirement for people who want or need to build from CVS. xsltproc is quite commonly installed nowadays and is available for Win32 as well, so I don't expect this to be a problem. Whenever you edit anything in the "menus" directory, please run 'make validate' to get your changes checked against the DTD. This ensures validity of the files which is important since GtkUIManager crashes badly on broken menu files. You need xmllint for this to work, so I strongly suggest you install that as well. I started to change our dialogs to be more compliant with the GNOME HIG. To ease this effort, I've added a new widget called GimpFrame. This is a variant of GtkFrame that doesn't draw a frame but instead sets a bold title and indents the content of the "frame" as suggested by the HIG. I've changed some core dialogs already and I think the results look very pleasant. Of course it's not sufficient to simply replace gtk_frame_new() with gimp_frame_new(), the dialog spacings needs some adjustments as well. The dialogs may become slightly larger by this change but I think that's OK for temporary dialogs. It's a problem for permanent dialogs like the tool options though. We will probably have to come up with a more compact style for these. Jimmac and Tigert promised to do some mockups for tool options that go well with HIG compliant dialogs but are more compact than strictly following the HIG-suggested layout. We will see how this turns out... What remains to be done here is changing all plug-in dialogs. I don't plan to do this myself so it would be nice to get some volunteers for this task. Basically each plug-in dialog needs to be reviewed. Unneeded frames such as those saying "Parameter Settings" or "Preview" should probably simply be removed. Frames that do actually group controls should be changed to use the new GimpFrame widget. Separators should be replaced by empty space. The spacing of the main vbox needs to be changed to 12 pixels to clearly separate groups of controls. The dialog border width should also be 12 pixels (although I personally prefer 6 pixels, but see http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/1.0/layout.html#window-layout-spacing). It's important that we try to create a consistent dialog layout so this job should be well coordinated or done by a single person. Any volunteers for this? What I didn't address yet is the fact that the HIG suggests to left-align labels of UI controls while we currently consistenly right-align labels so that they are close to the control they are describing. I am not sure if I can follow the HIG argumentation for this. I guess we should create some screenshots or mockups of standard GIMP dialogs and discuss this change here before we start to work on this. Sven
