carol.gimp.org

I often wonder what happened to cause this word "folder" to come to mean what I know as "directory" on computers. Having worked with computers and also with actual folders in an office situation, I find little in common between the two.

A folder is similar to a directory in that it holds information neatly in one area that has a name. A folder is disimilar to a directory in that as soon as you start to put folders within folders in real life, you have a big mess. On a computer, you have something that can make a lot of sense.

It is easier to for me to see how a computer science person might use this idea of folder to begin to explain the computers directories to some of the old girls I used to work with in the office. The analogy is so limited in its scope, I loathe to continue to use the word to describe this.

Then I got the story of my friend who called for Front Page support (she was trying to manage more than one site with the application) who was told on that operating system "No no! Don't try to put folders in folders!"

TheGIMP has folders within the folders....

Clicking on the triangle in the menu next to the folders icon produces a far more interesting and useful set of preferences. (Recreated in html/javascript in the menu to the right of the page here.)

I am demonstrating how TheGIMP handles directories now with the Font Folders (everyone cringe with me for this stupid word they use) preference dialog. Since gimp-1.2 the font handling has changed so much; it is now fairly easy to organize your fonts. Decorative fonts can be "fed" only to applications that will be using them, which should help to decrease the number of fonts one needs to search through. An example of this is my browser; I do not need dingbats there so with this new way Gimp2 handles fonts, I can put the dingbats where only gimp can read them. If I had another application that could use dingbats, I could make a "dingbats" directory in my home and share this location with gimp and the other application while still keeping them away from my browser, where they are basically useless.

If you are like me and like to install a whole bunch of fonts, it might be worth it for you to take the time to figure out how file system directories work and how this new font system works as well. The nice thing the way it works now is that you can organize your fonts any way you find useful. This can also be a problem as well, for the very same reason; at least it is each users problem now :)

To show these Folder dialogs a new directory, first highlight one of the directories in the current list. Duplicate that and use the file selector (the little button at the top at the far right) to find the new directory. Really simple. Toggling the "Writable" toggle in the new entry will allow you to add files to the directory from gimp.