On 20-Feb-05 Chris Green wrote:

How do you do anything with gimp plugins?

The particular one in question is the fractalexplorer plugin, my wife wants some mandelbrot printouts so I hunted around and found that the gimp I have installed on my Slackware system has a whole directory devoted to fractalexplorer plugins and one of them is called mandelbrot.

However I can't for the life of me work out how to feed the example files into the plugin in the gimp and get it to do anything.

I'm a gimp novice so nothing is obvious (apart from how to run it to start with, I can manage that!).

I've always found the Gimp very confusing because what you're looking for is never where you try to find it.

Following up your query, a google led me to

http://www.arcanefractals.com/tutorial_part1.shtml

which is a tutorial on doing fractals in the Gimp. It's written for Windows users, and there's a subtle difference when you use it on Linux.

You're OK with this tutorial until you get to the bit where it says

"Click on "Filters" at the top of the workspace and a menu will appear. Mouse down to "Render" then "Nature" and click "Flame". The Flame window will appear."

In Linux Gimp there's no menu bar on the top of the working window. Instead, *right click* on the background of the working window, and you'll get a drop-down menu.

Last but two on mine is "Filters", so click on this, then "Render" on the subsequent menu. The above tutorial wants to demo the "Flame" which is under "Nature" in the menu which you then get. "Fractal Explorer" is on this same menu, but under "Patterns".

So select this, and carry on from there. I just did a very handsome Mandelbrot this way! But you can see from the Fractal setup window that you have a variaty of fractal types (Click on the "Parameters" tab and also on the "Fractals" tab: in the latter you get a long list, any of which you can preview by double-clicking on its name).

Good luck, Ted.

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