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That is unfortunately how effects plugins work in Paint.net. I would prefer to be able to make custom tools that would show up in the Tools menu and don't require a popup window, but this is the only way for now.

So, it's been a while since @Eli's request. Soon after I started looking into it, I had a working solution. Unfortunately this introduced a couple of bugs that were hard to solve, and I had almost no time to work on the plugin. Eventually I decided to rewrite the entire plugin, cleaning up the code and probably producing faster results. As of now the opening post has been updated with the latest version 3.0 which adds support for any non-rectangular selection. Note that the plugin assumes that the selection is one whole and is convex (meaning there can be no holes inside the selection). @Eli please let me know how this version works for you. For the next version I will probably add an option to define the margins.

That's an interesting idea. Paint.NET only gives the bounding rectangle of the selection area but it's possible to find the actual selection by approximation. I've examined a few plugins, none of them seem to try and find the actual selection but there's a way to do it. I'm going to look into this and will let you know if it produces something workable.

As @AndrewDavid mentioned you're better off with the zip file in the opening post. I'm not sure which zip file you downloaded from Github - I did make some releases which include the zip file you're looking for, but I forgot to do that for the past few versions. So if you downloaded that, then it'll work but it'll be an older version. But more likely you have a zip file with the source code which doesn't run by itself. Just put the files (SpacedTextPlugin.dll and .pdb) in /Program Files/paint.net/Effects/ and start up Paint.NET Thanks for using my plugin!

After experimenting with it for a while, I finally got text justification working in a satisfactory way. It only sizes the spaces between words, so the letter spacing setting is respected inside words. The opening post has been updated with a new version of the plugin that offers a Justify option in the Text alignment dropdown.

That's very good to hear, you're welcome!

@xod: the issue with Unicode characters is fixed. Please note that European languages are fully supported (Cyrillic, Maltese, Romanian, etc.) but Asian and Hebrew characters do not support letter spacing. Without letter spacing: With letter spacing:

It should support Unicode. I'll look into this and get back to you over the weekend.

It's been a busy week but I managed to spend some time on the plugin. Several minor crashing bugs were fixed, and support for IsCancelRequested was added. This means the overall user experience should be better and there should be little to no crashes anymore. Antialiased text quality is slightly improved. @lynxster4 I hope this fixes the issues you had.

Thanks to @Eli's input I was able to fix a few alignment bugs. Also many thanks to @BoltBait for the config UI suggestions, these have been worked into the plugin. The zip file in the first post has been updated. Bugs fixed: - The last line always had a superfluous space at the end (if there's only one line, that's the last) - Alignment to center or right produced inconsistently positioned lines because of a rounding difference between the functions to measure and render text Thanks for bearing with me! Could you explain what issue you have with the Underline and Strikeout options? It's not immediately clear from the screenshot.

Could you post a screenshot of the settings you use when this happens?

@lynxster4 I'll look into it and get back to you. Edit: so far I've found a bug when there's more than one consecutive spaces in the Text field. Is that the case for you? Otherwise could you please post which plugin settings you used? (Text, Fontsize, LetterSpacing, Text aligment, etc.) Edit 2: OK, the bug seems to occur if the area of a line of text is to small (for example because the selection area is too small). This is now fixed. See the update in the opening post. If anyone still experiences issues with the plugin, please don't hesitate to let me know.

Alright, I've put version 2.0 up in the first post. Fixes As per request of @lynxster4, the steps of Letter spacing and Line spacing are now .01, allowing finer control. New features Automatic line wrapping Line spacing Text alignment to left, center or right Work in progress Justified text: this currently doesn't produce acceptable results. Hopefully I will be able to release this soon.

Thanks very much! The code checked in to Github wasn't overriding OnCreateConfigUI because I couldn't figure out what to do there. The base PropertyBasedEffect class calls CreateDefaultConfigUI by itself. I'm working this into the plugin and will release a new version hopefully today. It will also have some new features. Thanks for the positive feedback! Unfortunately such shadow and glow effects are outside my goal with the plugin.

Thanks for the positive feedback! That's actually what I wanted to do, but I couldn't figure out how. There's no step setting for a DoubleProperty. I've been looking at overriding OnCreateConfigUI but that is a lot more complicated it seems. Is there a tutorial or guide for making advanced config screens?