GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 167068
help file for web optimisation is misleading
Last modified: 2005-05-17 18:04:43 UTC
The help file concerning the optimisation of images for the web tells to use PNG instead of jpeg. This is wrong, since jpeg is much better for photographic images. This results in new users doing the wrong things while following the help advices, as seen on the windows-gimp-user mailing list. On February 11th, 2005, the following message ("Optimising photos for Web.?") was sent: ------------------------------------------------------------------------- I want to optimise a photo (JPEG) with regard to fast loading for a Web site - ie small file size. The Gimp Help files say: "One of the most common purposes GIMP is used for, is to prepare images for adding them to a web site" and I followed the instructions including flattening the image and saving it as a *.png file. However, this *.png file is much larger than the JPEG original and extremely slow to load, even on and ISDN connection running at 128 kbps. I would appreciate some advice and help on this matter. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Indeed, the user followed the guidelines provided by the documentation. A workaround is to change the chapter 2 section 7 (ch02s07.html) to distinguish between drawings and photos (instead of saying images), and mentionning that for photos, jpeg is the optimum format for publishing photos on the web.
I think the help should include a review of the various image formats (maybe as an appendix rather than scattered over the glossary) and help the users to decide based on the facts presented there (size vs. quality, browser support vs. features etc.). I'm also not sure if the whole chapter 2 of the help files is useful in its present state... it looks like an effort to squeeze grokking into an chapter of the help files, and I fear this is going to fail.
Re original bug report, I think the reporter is completely correct, and I am going to try to put together something a bit more useful in the near future. Re unified review of formats, I agree with this as well, but there isn't unity among the various doc contributors on this. Re chapter 2, it was never intended to "squeeze grokking into one chapter". It is intended to provide an overview of GIMP organized functionally, to complement the organization-by-structure (menus, dialogs, etc) of the rest of the docs.
I fixed this bug with the last checkin: 2005-05-06 Roman Joost <romanofski@gimp.org> * src/dialogs/path-dialog.xml: fixed indentation * src/using/paths.xml: added new german content, fixed spelling errors, replaced 'informalfigures' by figures * src/using/web.xml: fixed bug #167068 and added german translation * stylesheets/gimp-help-screen.css: removed fixed position of the navigation, because it steals to much content for reading
Resolving as FIXED based on comment #3.