GIMP help for Ubuntu user

June 2, 2008 - 00:53 — donfarang

I am a complete noob at photoshopping but I have this GIMP on my operating system and I would like to fiddle around with it, maybe do some political cartoons using images. Thing is it all look likes gobbledy-gook and when I try to play around with it I get nowhere. When I click User Manual under Help I get this message:

The GIMP help browser plug-in appears to be missing from your installation.

So, I come here and enter "help browser plug-in" in the keyword search and get absolutely bupkiss. I try variations on it but no solid hits. Where is this manual?

I do a lot of tinkering around off-line so I would like to download this help manual to peruse at leisure without being connected.

Thank you for any help you can give.

Plugins & Scripts

April 28, 2010 - 08:33 — schumaml

Just to make sure: has anyone

Just to make sure: has anyone reported this to Ubuntu yet? It's not really useful to discuss and make wild guesses guess about this here, at least.

Ubuntu bugs are tracked in launchpad:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gimp/+bugs

March 7, 2010 - 22:33 — frt975

Try this

Go to Edit/Preferences/Help System/
Change the web browser to "yelp %" (Without the quotes)
Then change the help browser to "Web Browser"

April 26, 2010 - 03:50 — pgn674

Got It

I figured it out from this post. I have Ubuntu 9.10, GIMP 2.6.7.

I have the gimp-help-en package installed already. In GIMP, I went to Edit > Preferences > Help System, and changed Help Browser > Help browser to use: to Web browser, and I changed Web Browser > Web browser to use: to "yelp" without the quotes.

Now when I hover over a menu item that says "Press F1 for more help" and I press F1, Gnome Desktop Help opens up looking at the correct article. Yay!

November 18, 2008 - 02:05 — IndyTim

Go to either Adept or

Go to either Adept or Synaptic and enter GIMP as a search criteria. Select the GIMP-Help-En and install. Re-launch GIMP and your on-line help will be available. IndyTim

June 2, 2008 - 12:40 — PhotoComiX

Gimp-help is a separate download

Do you know Synaptic? (In System/administration/) well open Synaptic click "search" icon ,type "gimp help" and you will see a list of gimp-help packages one should be in your language, check it, click apply, give your sudo PW (same that for login in your computer) press "enter".... never understand why gimp-help is not included as default, help for a advanced graphic editor as Gimp do not seem something "optional" but strictly needed. Do no miss the context help ,when you pass your mouse over a tool or menu, F1 (or Shift+F1) will open the relate page of the help

June 6, 2008 - 09:13 — donfarang

Thank you for your help.

Thank you for your help. Cheers!

April 18, 2009 - 22:53 — Anonymous

Doesn't work

That doesn't work. I HAVE the gimp-help.en package installed. It still says that the Gimp help BROWSER is not installed. It offers to use a web browser to read it, but that doesn't work either. It never actually launches my browser.

April 23, 2009 - 15:46 — bootchk

help-browser plug-in ubuntu

Bottom line: Can't help you, but agree that things are amiss. My platform is ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid with Gimp 2.6.4. I get the same dialog ".... help browser appears not to be installed" but when I choose the "...online" button, a separate browser DOES open to the online help docs. It seems as thought the help docs (gimp-help.en) and the help-browser plug-in are separate. (Apparently, the Gimp folks think the size of the help docs is too great to bundle with gimp program.) But Synaptic doesn't show me any package for the help-browser plug-in. And the Debian site seems to show that the plug-in is virtual, which I think means the plug-in should come in the gimp package. I did install gimp-help.en and the help-browser plug-in doesn't seem to be part of that. I can't find any executable called help-browser in /usr/lib/gimp/2.0/plugins, which is where it should be. So it seems like it does NOT come with the gimp package, at least in this release of Ubuntu. Also, using Help>Browse Plugins in Gimp, it doesn't list any plug-in named help-browser. (But I think this only lists those plug-ins that install their own menu item, not extensions that have no menu item. The source code shows that the help-browser plug-in is really an extension, without a menu item.) The source code for the help-browser plug-in is inside the source for gimp, in a directory plug-ins/help-browser. It seems to show that the name of the executable should be "help-browser". I haven't tried making the help-browser plug-in from the gimp source. The web shows much discussion of its dependency on webkit, but I don't think that is the problem. My best guess is that Ubuntu failed to include it, and there is no other place to get it except to compile it out of the gimp source (not a package, but visit gimp.org.) The gimp org won't care that Ubuntu failed to make it. It seems strange that the gimp wants a plugin for browsing anyway. Why not just start a separate browser pointing to the local help files? plashless, off banks of noon

April 22, 2009 - 04:08 — PhotoComiX

Doesn't work

Topic was about Ubuntu (linux) Do you use Ubuntu too ..or Windows ?

March 1, 2010 - 03:47 — rifter

no gimp help browser plugin in LINUX

In reply to the comment that asked whether any of the people having this problem were using Windows, the answer is no. If you read the posts, this becomes apparent.

I've looked all over the net, and despite some posts saying that the Gimp Help Browser plugin didn't exist for windows, I could not find it for linux, either, and I'm not the only one.

I'm running Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala 32-bit and gimp 2.6.7 and the problem remains. I am reading about this being a problem in a number of distributions, and you would think that somewhere you would see a name of a package that is supposed to have this plugin, but there isn't.

The only solution anyone has found so far is to change the help system preferences

Edit -> Preferences -> Help System

so that User Manual says "Use a locally installed copy" and change the Help Browser from "GIMP help browser" (which we don't have) to "web browser."

Now that is also what happens if you get the error mentioned and then click the button that says to use the web browser instead of the help browser. But because of another bug, that breaks too, leading people here.

On that same preferences dialog you might notice that there's a command listed under "Web browser to use." Well, for me (and granted I know this is from the config from the deb package) it said

sensible-browser %s

which would never ever work for anyone. I read another forum where someone said they had "a web browser" in that space.

So, yes, changing that to

firefox %s

would give you the help. Nevermind that that was never the question :P.

The question is, is there a "GIMP help browser" plugin for GIMP and if so how is it installed? If there is not, why is the default to use that, and why is the default on many systems to also have a broken command for the web browser command?

If we at least knew what the "GIMP Help Browser" plugin package was called it might help us find it. Instead you will find threads like the one above all over the net ending in a frustrated turn to either manually launching the help html files or otherwise using a different browser. So ... what's the deal?

March 1, 2010 - 17:36 — PhotoComiX

the gimp help browser is

the gimp help browser is supposed to be part of gimp not a extra
(this is a weird because the Help is a extra...and what the sense to have a gimp help browser without the Help ?..oh well maybe should have other functions that i ignore)

back to the point as melvin reported in the packadge 1 dependency (gtkhtml-2 ) is missed so the browser cannot work

The solutions apparently are

1 report to your distro since is a problem coming by a defect in the packaging, or more exactly that may be corrected during packaging
2 if you want a quick solution compile by yourself , luckily in linux is much easier then in Other OS and in case of gimp there are a lot of step by step how to...

March 9, 2010 - 13:41 — schumaml

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