New Pandora, Reversing Layers, and Script-Fu Booleans (Shallow Thoughts)

New Pandora, Reversing Layers, and Script-Fu Booleans

Dave thought I wasted too much presentation time reversing the layers in my panorama example prior to running Pandora. I'm sure he's right.

The problem is that GIMP's "Open as Layers", if you select multiple layers, opens them in the opposite direction from the way you'd generally expect to use them in a panorama, with the lexigraphically first layer on the top of the stack rather than the bottom.

The very next day, someone showed up on IRC asking how to reverse layers, because "Open as Layers" opened them in the wrong order to use for an animation.

At Mitch's suggestion, I wrote a reverse-layers script-fu (which Mitch improved by pointing out that it didn't handle the possible error case of a floating layer. As it happens, re-ordering floating layers works fine in current CVS, but apparently it's not supposed to. I suspect being able to move layers without alpha off the bottom position in the stack may also be a bug, so I added a guard against that). (Update: No, it turns out it's intentional that non-alpha layers can be moved anywhere in the stack in 2.3.)

Layer->Stack->Reverse Layer Order is now included in CVS GIMP, but for users of earlier versions I've made it available: reverse-layers.scm.

Meanwhile, I made a new version of Pandora which can build a panorama in either direction. I still find it slightly jarring to assemble a panorama from right to left after building them from left to right for so long, but maybe I'll get used to it.

I caught another bug at the same time: I was testing one of the parameters set in the GIMP dialog (which sets a toggle to either TRUE or FALSE) like this: (if use-mask (do-stuff))

That doesn't work in script-fu. Turns out TRUE is just an integer, while if apparently only tests for Lisp nil or non-nil. So you have to say (if (= use-mask TRUE) (do-stuff)) if you want tests to work against booleans coming from GIMP dialogs.

Tags: gimp
[ 23:22 May 27, 2006    More gimp | permalink to this entry | ]