| Capítol 12. Enrich my GIMP | ||
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Part II. How do I Become a GIMP Wizard? |  |
| Capítol 12. Enrich my GIMP | ||
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Part II. How do I Become a GIMP Wizard? | |
Sumari
The preferences dialog can be accessed from the image menu-bar, through → . It lets you customize many aspects of the way GIMP works. The following sections detail the settings that you can customize, and what they affect.
All of the Preferences information is stored in a file called
gimprc in your personal GIMP directory, so
if you are a «power user» who would rather work with a
text editor than a graphical interface, you can alter preferences by
editing that file. If you do, and you are on a Linux system,
then man gimprc will give you a lot of
technical information about the contents of the file and what
they are used for.
Figura 12.2. Environment Preferences
This page lets you customize the amount of system memory allocated for various purposes. It also allows you to disable the confirmation dialogs that appear when you close unsaved images, and to set the size of thumbnail files that GIMP produces.
Resource Consumption
GIMP allows you to undo most actions by maintaining an «Undo History» for each image, for which a certain amount of memory is allocated. Regardless of memory usage, however, GIMP always permits some minimal number of the most recent actions to be undone: this is the number specified here. See Secció 3, «Undoing» for more information about GIMP's Undo mechanism.
This is the amount of undo memory allocated for each image. If the Undo History size exceeds this, the oldest points are deleted, unless this would result in fewer points being present than the minimal number specified above.
This is the amount of system RAM allocated for GIMP image data. If GIMP requires more memory than this, it begins to swap to disk, which may in some circumstances cause a dramatic slowdown. You are given an opportunity to set this number when you install GIMP, but you can alter it here. See How to Set Your Tile Cache for more information.
This is not a hard constraint: if you try to create a new image larger than the specified size, you are asked to confirm that you really want to do it. This is to prevent you from accidentally creating images much larger than you intend, which can either crash GIMP or cause it to respond verrrrrrrry slowwwwwwwwly.
Default is one. Your computer may have more than one processor.
Image Thumbnails
This options allows you to set the size of the thumbnails shown in the File Open dialog (and also saved for possible use by other programs). The options are «None», «Normal (128x128)», and «Large (256x256)».
If an image file is larger than the specified maximum size, GIMP will not generate a thumbnail for it. This options allows you to prevent thumbnailing of extremely large image files from slowing GIMP to a crawl.
Saving Images
Closing an image is not undoable, so by default GIMP asks you to confirm that you really want to do it, whenever it would lead to a loss of unsaved changes. You can disable this if you find it annoying; but then of course you are responsible for remembering what you have and have not saved.
Document history
When checked, files you have opened will be saved in the Document history. You can access the list of files with the Document history dialog from the image menu-bar : → → .
Figura 12.3. Assorted Interface Preferences
This page lets you customize language, layer/channel previews and keyboard shortcuts.
Options
The GIMP's default language is that of your system. You can select another language in the drop-down list. You have to start GIMP again to make this change effective. Please refer to Secció 1.2, «Idioma».
By default, GIMP shows miniature previews of the contents of layers and channels in several places, including the Layers dialog. If for some reason you would prefer to disable these, you can do it by unchecking Enable layer and channel previews. If you do want previews to be shown, you can customize their sizes using the menus for Default layer and channel preview size and Navigation preview size.
Any menu item can be activated by holding down Alt and pressing a sequence of keys. Normally, the key associated with each menu entry is shown as an underlined letter in the text, called accelerator. If for some reason you would prefer the underlines to go away (maybe because you think they're ugly and you don't use them anyway), then you can make this happen by unchecking Show menu mnemonics.
GIMP can give you the ability to create keyboard shortcuts (key combinations that activate a menu entry) dynamically, by pressing the keys while the pointer hovers over the desired menu entry. However, this capability is disabled by default, because it might lead novice users to accidentally overwrite the standard keyboard shortcuts. If you want to enable it, check Use dynamics keyboard shortcuts here.
Pressing the button for Configure Keyboard Shortcuts brings up the Shortcut Editor, which gives you a graphical interface to select menu items and assign shortcuts to them.
If you change shortcuts, you will probably want your changes to continue to apply in future GIMP sessions. If not, uncheck Save keyboard shortcuts on exit. But remember that you have done this, or you may be frustrated later. If you don't want to save shortcuts on exit every session, you can save the current settings at any time using the Save Keyboard Shortcuts Now button, and they will be applied to future sessions. If you decide that you have made some bad decisions concerning shortcuts, you can reset them to their original state by pressing Reset Saved Keyboard Shortcuts to Default Values.
This page lets you select a theme, which determines many aspects of the appearance of the GIMP user interface, including the set of icons used, their sizes, fonts, spacing allowed in dialogs, etc. Two themes are supplied with GIMP: Default, which is probably best for most people, and Small, which may be preferable for those with small or low-resolution monitors. Clicking on a theme in the list causes it to be applied immediately, so it is easy to see the result and change your mind if you don't like it.
You can also use custom themes, either by downloading them from the
net, or by copying one of the supplied themes and modifying it.
Custom themes should be places in the themes
subdirectory of your personal GIMP directory: if they are, they
will appear in the list here. Each theme is actually a directory
containing ASCII files that you can edit. They are pretty
complicated, and the meaning of the contents goes beyond the scope
of this documentation, but you should feel free to experiment: in
the worst case, if you mess things up completely, you can always
revert back to one of the supplied themes.
You cannot edit the supplied themes unless you have administrator permissions, and even if you do, you shouldn't: if you want to customize a theme, make a copy in your personal directory and work on it. If you make a change and would like to see the result «on the fly», you can do so by saving the edited theme file and then pressing Reload Current Theme.
Figura 12.5. Help System Preferences
This page lets you customize the behaviour of the GIMP help system.
General
Tool tips are small help pop-ups that appear when the pointer hovers for a moment over some element of the interface, such as a button or icon. Sometimes they explain what the element does; sometimes they give you hints about non-obvious ways to use it. If you find them too distracting, you can disable them here by unchecking this option. We recommend that you leave them enabled unless you are a very advanced user.
This option controls whether the help buttons are shown on every tool dialog, which may be used alternatively to invoke the help system.
This drop-down list lets you select between Use a locally installed copy and Use the online version. See Secció 12.2, «Help».
Help Browser
GIMP Help is supplied in the form of HTML files, i. e., web pages. You can view them using either a special help browser that comes with GIMP, or a web browser of your choice. Here you choose which option to use. Because the help pages were carefully checked to make sure they work well with GIMP's browser, whereas other web browsers are somewhat variable in their support of features, the safer option is to use the internal browser; but really any modern web browser should be okay.
![[Nota]](images/note.png)
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Nota |
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Note that the GIMP help browser is not available on all platforms. If it is missing, this option is hidden and the standard web browser will be used to read the help pages. |
Figura 12.6. Tool Options Preferences
This page lets you customize several aspects of the behavior of tools.
General
Self explanatory
Self explanatory
Self explanatory
Guide and Grid Snapping
«Snapping» to guides, or to an image grid, means that when a tool is applied by clicking somewhere on the image display, if the clicked point is near enough to a guide or grid, it is shifted exactly onto the guide or grid. Snapping to guides can be toggled using → in the image menu; and if the grid is switched on, snapping to it can be toggled using → . This preference option determines how close a clicked point must be to a guide or grid in order to be snapped onto it, in pixels.
Scaling
When you scale something, each pixel in the result is calculated by interpolating several pixels in the source. This option determines the default interpolation method: it can always be changed, though, in the Tool Options dialog.
There are four choices:
This is the fastest method, but it's quite crude: you should only consider using it if your machine is very seriously speed-impaired.
This used to be the default, and is good enough for most purposes.
This is the best choice (although it can actually look worse than Linear for some types of images), but also the slowest. Since GIMP 2.6, this method is the default.
This method performs a high quality interpolation.
Paint Options Shared Between Tools
You can decide here whether changing the brush etc for one tool should cause the new item to be used for all tools, or whether each individual tool (pencil, paintbrush, airbrush, etc) should remember the item that was last used for it specifically.
Move tool
You can decide here whether changing the current layer or path when using the move tool and without pressing any key.
This page lets you customize the appearance of the Toolbox, by deciding whether the three «context information» areas should be shown at the bottom.
Appearance
Controls whether the color area on the left (2) appears in the Toolbox.
Controls whether the area in the center (3), with the brush, pattern, and gradient icons, appears in the Toolbox.
Controls whether a preview of the currently active image appears on the right (4).
Tools configuration
In this list, tools with an eye are present in the Toolbox. By default, color tools have no eye: you can add them to the Toolbox by clicking the corresponding checkbox.
You can also sort tools by priority using the arrow up and down buttons at the bottom of the dialog.
This option replaces the Tools Dialog of former GIMP versions.
This tab lets you customize the default settings for the New Image dialog. See the New Image Dialog section for an explanation of what each of the values means.
This page lets you customize the default properties of GIMP's grid, which can be toggled on or off using → from the image menu. The settings here match those in the Configure Image Grid dialog, which can be used to reconfigure the grid for an existing image, by choosing → from the image menu. See the Configure Grid dialog section for information on
