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- <p>
- For the most part you can use a plugin like any other Gimp tool,
- without needing to be aware that it is a plugin. But there are
- a few things about plugins that are useful to understand.
- </p>
- <p>
- One is that plugins are generally not as robust as the Gimp
- core. When Gimp crashes, it is considered a very serious
- thing: it can cost the user a lot of trouble and headache. When
- a plugin crashes, the consequences are usually not so serious.
- In most cases you can just continuing working without worrying
- about it.
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- Because plugins are separate programs, they communicate with the
- Gimp core in a special way: the Gimp developers call it
- "talking over a wire". When a plugin crashes, the communication
- breaks down, and you will see an error message about a "wire
- read error".
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- When a plugin crashes, Gimp gives you a very ominous-looking
- message telling you that the plugin may have left Gimp in a
- corrupted state, and you should consider saving your images and
- exiting. Strictly speaking, this is quite correct, because
- plugins have the power to alter almost anything in Gimp, but for
- practical purposes, experience has shown that corruption is
- actually quite rare, and many users just continue working and
- don't worry about it. Our advice is that you simply think about
- how much trouble it would cause you if something went wrong, and
- weigh it against the odds.
- </p>
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- <p>
- Because of the way plugins communicate with Gimp, they do not
- have any mechanism for being informed about changes you make to
- an image after the plugin has been started. If you start a
- plugin, and then alter the image using some other tool, the
- plugin will often crash, and when it doesn't will usually give a
- bogus result. You should avoid running more than one plugin at
- a time on an image, and avoid doing anything to the image until
- the plugin has finished working on it. If you ignore this
- advice, not only will you probably screw up the image, you will
- probably screw up the undo system as well, so that you won't
- even be able to recover from your foolishness.
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