carol.gimp.org

Along with the usual sources of help, TheGIMP website, the somewhat outdated yet still very useful online book Grok the Gimp or searching the internet with your favorite search engine; the Gimp comes with some aides.

Consider leaving these preferences toggled "ON" until you get a feel for this application. They will be helpful to people new to pixel manipulation and they will be helpful to people trying to learn how the gimp works after having learned how other applications work; especially if those people paid attention to the words that were being used by those other apps.

General

Tooltips

This is part of a screen shot of my toolbox with the tooltips in action. Since I have my tooltips configured to be on and since I also have the menu mnemonics set to show everytime I hover the mouse over a button (in this case, the clone tool) TheGIMP tells me what the tool will do and shows the keybinding at the end of the tip (in this case, the keybinding for the clone tool is C). I left the mnemonics on with the goal of one day learning them. This has yet to occur....

With the Help Button

Without the Help Button

Help Browser

GIMP Help Browser

GTK provides a nice lightweight browser, TheGIMP developers have included the means to access this especially if you are like me and find that running a full-fledged browser to be a little too much for what is basically some text, hyperlinks and perhaps a few images.

TheGIMP's help is in a different package, module or executable depending on your os, distribution or whatever means you use to get your gimp with. To be completely honest, I am using debian testing for most of my software; I build gimp from cvs a few times a week. To complete this section of the preferences, I installed the gimp-help package from debian and I don't want to tell you what I did to get it to work with my cvs build of my gimp.

Editorial about documentation software (not people who document software). When I first heard about the beauty and flexibility of xml, I was sold and started to imagine the ability to use this concept to make contributing documentation to good free software projects (like TheGIMP) easier for people. This never happened. Instead, the old system became a little more difficult to use.

When I pushed the Help Button for this new Softglow plug-in, I learned that Appendix B is missing from the help files I got from my distribution. It is time for me to contribute or to figure it out for myself.