Programming Web Graphics with Perl and GNU Softwar

Appendix C. Procedure Reference for the Gimp

This appendix provides a reference to the interface to the Gimp’s internal Procedural Database (PDB). The Gimp’s API says that all procedures and plug-ins must contain some sort of documentation about themselves, and this documentation gets logged in the PDB when the procedure is registered. There are several ways of accessing this information while you are programming. The most helpful is the DB Browser extension, which provides a searchable interface to the PDB from within the Gimp.^[21] The DB Browser has certain limitations for the Gimp-Perl programmer, however. In the DB Browser, all procedure names are delimited by hyphens (gimp-image-new, for example), while Perl uses underscores (gimp_image_new). The reference tables in this appendix list the Gimp procedure names with underscores. The names of several constants are also different when working with the Gimp-Perl module than they appear in the DB Browser (the paint modes, for example). These are noted in the following tables also.

The purpose of this reference is to give you another way of looking at the Gimp’s procedures. It is ordered by functional category. This reference should be used in conjunction with the DB Browser, because the Browser provides you with a look inside the version of Gimp that you are currently running and is by definition more up-to-date. There are also several scripts and filters that are not documented here.

The following tables are broken down into ten ...