Just upgraded to Gimp 2.0.0 (under Mac OS X 10.3.3). Everything works well, and most things work *much* better than the great old Gimp 1 under Solaris I've been using for years. The 1Ghz Mac does outrun my old 400MHz Sparc machine by an enormous margin. Big win. Thanks to all you developers for a job well done... Except, unfortunately, for text- and it's a just user-expectation problem. The new behavior of creating a new layer for each individual text object by default breaks my workflow. My tasks using Gimp involve adding literally hundreds of individual text annotations to very large (~200Mb) multilayered image files. I realize that having text set up to go onto separate layers and remain editable will be useful for almost every user of the tool. But it is broken for me, since there doesn't appear to be a way to turn this behavior off and return to the old simple approach. My whole working style has evolved around the old method of simply and quickly rendering it onto the active layer, which I treat as a generic scratch layer while doing the image analysis chores I need to do. The only way I've found of imitating the old Gimp behavior is to tediously "merge down" the newly created layer after each item is entered- a very, very painful and extremely time consuming process when working with extremely large files (each merge takes 25-30 seconds in the file I'm currently working with). Is there a workaround? Failing that, can this be regarded as a plea for a backwards compatible render-to-active-layer mode in the Preferences (or tool options) for those few of us users who actually liked it (and depended on it!) the old braindead way it was? After RTFM and finding no workaround, I tried to check the archives of these mailing lists for clues, but the archives I was able to locate at lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU haven't been re-indexed since September of 2003. A search of the rawfiles produced only discussion of the new features, and Google searches did not provide any useful information either. So: I'm going to the source, so to speak. (;-) Thanks in advance for your help, and for all your efforts. Adding this new functionality into the text tool has clearly required a lot of effort from a lot of folks for a lot of years: sorry for the semi-negative feedback. As I said, kudos to all of you for the hard work it has taken to make this tool what it is! -skod -- Scott Griffith ISES-LLC 9745 Steeplechase Drive Franktown, CO 80116 303-660-2541 303-660-2542 fax skod@xxxxxxxxxxxx
