ejdewan

Afterthought: your suggestion to use extra layers to isolate stuff is right on the money! I could have put all the text in a separate layer, and made adjustments with no trouble at all. Cheers.

I tried Inkscape, and it's a lovely package -- just what I had in mind. Thanks for the tip.

Thanks for the helpful comments. I think I didn't pose my question clearly enough; yes, when creating text and pictures, rotation is fairly easy, and I have mastered this aspect of it. However, after the object in question has been bitmapped into the picture, it can be devilishly hard to go back and select some parts of it, especially, for example, slanted text that sits within a few pixels of a line or some other object. The lasso tool is not quite up to this task. My original idea was to implement some form of rotation for the selection tool itself, so as to match a selection rectangle to some rotated part of the picture. However, an easier technique might be to have another selection tool which is similar to the standard line-drawing tools in which you click once to locate a starting point, and then, perhaps while holding down the shift key, click on successive points until you have the object in question surrounded (by a series of straight lines), and then release the shift key, at which point the tool completes the selection back to the starting point. This would make it relatively easy to create a selection line that navigates through long, narrow gaps between parts of the diagram. (An example of this might be a bar code printed at an angle, where you want to splice out one or more lines for some reason.) Well, I'm outta here. My map is completed, and I couldn't have done it with Microsoft Paint. Thanks a lot for Paint.net, and for all the help! I'll make a contribution, if I can find out how to pay by check.

I'm drawing a small map, and in several places there is text rotated so as to fit next to a slanted line. The problem comes when I decide to move the text, usually along a line parallel to itself, or perhaps in some other direction. As far as I can tell, the only way to select the text is with the lasso tool, which can be very difficult, because of the close tolerances. Maybe the easiest way is simply to erase the text and re-create it. So, is there some way to rotate the selection box, so I can grab the slanted text easily?

Is it possible to "reactivate" a line segment or curve after you have moved on and finalized the curve? For example, I go off to a corner and draw a small piece, and then shift it to its desired position in the main part of the drawing. However, I need to make a small adjustment by grabbing the end handle and shifting it a little. How do I get the handles to appear again, or is that information lost in the bitmap? (I am used to drawing programs where each object is preserved for all time, and can be reactivated simply by clicking on it.) Of course, I should probably draw the object in place, and do the tweaking before hitting Enter.

Is this a problem? I thought it should be reported: Adware iBryte: C:\DOWNLOADS3\PAINT PROGRAMS\PAINTDOTNET_SETUP.EXE C:\SANDBOX\ED_DEWAN\DEFAULTBOX\DRIVE\C\DOWNLOADS3\PAINT SOFTWARE\PAINTDOTNET_SETUP.EXE C:\WINDOWS\Prefetch\PAINTDOTNET_SETUP.EXE-2F2E28D9.pf

Cool! I missed that; thanks a lot. Over and out.

Query: why was this topic header allowed? (I just read the rules...)

(In fact, there is no "layer window" as such, just a pull-down menu.)

The online tutorial shows, in the layers window, an uparrow and a downarrow, supposedly used to change the level of the current layer: Move Layer Up This will move the current layer to a higher position in the layer order. Move Layer Down This will move the current layer to a lower position in the layer order. However, these arrows do not appear in my program. Also, I'm not clear on the function of "move layer up", since the current layer is the top layer, isn't it? So, how do I push the current layer back, so that the one behind it becomes the current layer? (At present I have only two layers in the picture I'm working on.) I installed version 3.5.10 either yesterday or the day before, so it is current.