AshleyScirra

Would be great if you can get PNG format in the next release! Thanks for the update.

Hi Paint.NET team, Thanks for making a great image editor. Apologies if this post is in the wrong forum. I'm developer of Construct 2, a native (C++) Windows app that creates HTML5 games. See www.scirra.com for more. I believe lots of our users use Paint.NET for image editing before importing to Construct 2, especially since we recommend it as a better alternative to MS Paint. I'm trying to support Paint.NET's clipboard format so users can easily copy and paste artwork from Paint.NET in to their games. However I'm struggling to find a way to support alpha channels in Paint.NET's clipboard data. Sprites for games almost always use transparency, therefore supporting alpha is essential. The only clipboard formats I can see coming from Paint.NET version 3.510.4297.28964 are: CF_BITMAP with all alpha set to 0xFF CF_DIB with all alpha set to 0xFF CF_DIBV5 with all alpha set to 0xFF "PaintDotNet.MaskedSurface". I cannot find any documentation on this format. We are a native app so we cannot use any .NET code to read it. At a glance it also looks very difficult to reverse engineer since it seems to use a variable length header, so I do not believe it is practical to try reverse engineering. The best thing I can think of all-round is: just support the "PNG" format. Save the selection to a .png file and dump the entire file bytes in to clipboard memory. This has the following advantages: - we already can read the PNG clipboard format with alpha - Paint.NET can already read PNG clipboard data from other apps - it appears to be a semi-standard, since Microsoft Office 2010 can read the format with alpha as well. Our editor supports PNG clipboard format, and we can paste images with alpha preserved in to Word 2010 and Powerpoint 2010. This should help make Paint.NET more useful as well, since it will fix alpha being lost when pasting in to MS Office. The next best option I can think of is: - set the correct alpha bytes in the DIBV5 format. Our editor already reads these if they're set, but Paint.NET overwrites them with 0xFF. Hopefully it's straightforward to do that... Finally the last ditch option is if you can offer some tips to read the PaintDotNet.MaskedSurface format. However this looks like a time consuming option, so I would prefer not to get involved with it. I strongly recommend supporting the PNG clipboard format since it will improve interoperability with several other programs, not just ours. Unfortunately if we cannot find a solution to this problem, since alpha is used routinely in game development, we will have to start recommending a different tool - a great shame given the quality of Paint.NET. Thanks and please let me know what your thoughts are!