I was a little dissatisfied with the availibility and quality of tools for Linux to create clickable imagemaps. Since the Gimp already provides a lot of the functionality that is needed for writing such a tool I have designed a plug-in that hopefully meets all your imagemapping requirements.

Most people are probably already using Gimp 1.2.x. In that case you don't need to download this plugin since it is already part of the official GIMP distribution.

At the moment no active development is going on. I consider this plug-in pretty mature. However I might resume development as soon as Gimp 1.4/2.0 appears.

You will only want this when you are still using Gimp 1.0.4! Latest version is 1.3.2. Click here to download.

An example editing session:

Yes, this program definitely needs a manual. Like all programmers I haven't had time for this and it is not that high on my priority list. Fortunately there are at the moment at least 2 books that describe this plug-in in more detail: the official Gimp User Manual and a book called 'Grokking the Gimp'. In chapter 9.2 Clickable Image Maps you can find a nice tutorial on this plug-in. More details about this book can be found on the Gimp homepage.

These are already quite a lot of tools out there to create imagemaps:

• CSIME (Client Side Image Map Editor): written in Java. At the moment I think this is one of the best tools to do the job.
• KImageMapEditor: Quite new and already showing a lot of promise. As the name already implies, this is a program written for KDE.
• MapEdit: not bad but also not free.
• Mapster: From his homepage: Mapster is a simple graphical tool that does no fancy tricks, just automates the most tedious part of a tedious job. Written in Tcl/Tk.
• JavaMapper: Another tool written in Java.
• TkImgMap : From his homepage: TkImgMap is dedicated to the creation of image maps that can be included in a Web page. It has a deliberate Windows 95 look & feel, but it's vanilla Tcl/Tk and can be run (almost) anywhere.
• ImapTool: This is a simple X-Windows based tool.
• Hotspots.scm: A Script-Fu for Gimp.
• Emacs, vi or your personal favorite editor: of course you don't need a fancy tool to create an imagemap. You can use an imageviewer (for example XV) to get the coordinates and enter these in the mapfile. Real programmers would prefer it this way ;-)

There are a few things still left on my todo list. In no particular order:

• Adapt the plug-in so it can be used in the Bluefish HTML editor.
• Use a nicer preview widget, for example GtkEditor to show the generated HTML code.
• Dynamic update of preview widget.
• Import Netscape/Mozilla bookmarks.
• ...

These are the bugs known to me in version 1.3.2:

• Rulers move when scrolling in preview window. The rules should stay at a fixed position. I hope to fix this as soon as there is a common preview widget in the Gimp library.
• 'Show area URL tip' in the General Preferences dialog isn't implemented yet.
• Zooming is still much too slow :(
• ...

• My girlfriend Laura for drawing the Groundhog picture and for being very patient with me even when I spend too much time behind my computer :)
• Mete Cirali for donating very nice looking icons.
• The GIMP developers for adding my humble plug-in to the offical GIMP distribution.
• The countless people that have sent in bug reports.