HCGS

Hello everyone, In all my years using Paint.NET (around 15 now!) one thing that I noticed to consistently struggle with the most is dealing with transparency. Simply put, I don't think the app has enough tools to deal with alpha. We have like, the eraser and the ability to delete things. The most obviously missing thing is an alpha mask feature. I'm sure this has been requested hundreds of times and I'm sure there are pretty good reasons as to why it was never added. I assume that this is due to technical reasons- depending on how intricate the desired implementation is, it might even require a total rework of the pdn file format or layers (for instance, adding yet another widely requested feature: layer groups). However, I don't see a reason as to why we couldn't have a way more simplified implementation. Would it be too hard to add a new layer Blend Mode that, you know, interacts with alpha whatsoever? For example, a "true" multiply mode that multiplies even the alpha channel. I don't know how the blending is implemented, but if it's like some standard shader code, it should be easier to implement a multiply with alpha rather than what we currently have. I'm well aware of Alpha Mask plugins, such as the one in BoltBait's pack. However, as it is merely an effect, it's not really an option in situations where constant change is required. I hope you can understand why constantly flattening an image, copying a mask texture, applying an effect and saving an image is not exactly scalable. It's a lot of rework for something that should be instant and easy. There are a lot of use cases for tools that more easily deal with alpha- from design to game development, it's a vital feature for any image editing software. And I don't think it's particularly healthy for a feature to rely solely on plugins.

Drawing/scaling from center is awesome! As a matter of fact, I even kinda assumed we already had it. I even tried it a few times, but nothing happened, so I would think I just didn't know the keybind

Tile Count v1.0 Render > Tile Count Description: Draws a counter on tiled, spritesheet-like images. Download: TileCount.zip (Zip with bat installer) TileCount.dll (Just the dll) Before After UI Long description This plugin counts the tiles (or sprites) of a spritesheet-like image and draws a number on top of each one. It divides the entire image in a grid, and as long as there is at least a single pixel with an alpha greater than Alpha threshold on a tile, this tile will be counted. The counting goes from top left to bottom right. If this sounds complicated, I think the example images above will do a better explanation. Important notes This plugin assumes your image is already properly divided into a grid. This assumes all grid cells have the same size. You can set Alpha threshold to -1; this will cause every cell in the grid to be counted. This does not take your selection into consideration, it works with the entire image. I might fix this if I ever get around to it. Less important notes This is my first plugin. I really needed to count a lot of sprites for a project and there was no way I was going to do that manually, so I wrote this in like, 3 hours... sorry if it lacks features or has bugs. I thought it may be useful to others, that's why I'm sharing it here. I think someone might even find another use for it, like... making a calendar. If you're interested, here's the source code: TileCount.cs

A shame, really. Yes, I know it's completely subjective. That's why I think it's silly to enforce this... (I'm not talking about you - I blame Microsoft!) Personally, I think it's a great thing that tabs have variable width! To me, indents are logical separators, not visual ones. One indent equals one tab, and its visual width is just your personal preference. Anyway... Well, it's not really a big deal, replacing manually is quite easy. Or actually, it would just be easier to simply to do a replace in the templates before adding them to the documents if the user has some "use tabs" option enabled.

Well. I always use tabs on every language. It's just better. Spaces are slower to work with, can mess indents accidentally and, in general, make no sense at all. I know there's a bunch of code style conventions in C#, but is spaces vs. tabs really one of them? I've been using C# for years and have never heard of this.

Aww, no option to use tabs instead of spaces?

That sub is nearly abandoned. I'd even say this forum is more active...

Yeah, it makes sense. It is a shame, though. Most people nowadays don't have the patience to use a forum. And I'm sure a large part (possibly most?) of the userbase has never even visited this place. You know, I think a lot about the sate of this software and of the community. I wonder how many active PDN users are there. A few million? A couple thousand at most? It's a great tool (even if it has some big issues), but I feel like it has fallen down to the state of becoming too niche. I still remember the "golden age" of PDN, back when a lot of people genuinely thought it would eventually replace the original MS Paint. I was one of these people. I know it's not the case, but whenever I use PDN (which is almost on a daily basis, professionally at that!) I always feel like I'm the only one out there still using it. Like a stubborn old man who refuses to learn something new. I rarely see a PDN user "in the wild", and whenever people ask me what I use for editing they get baffled when I tell them it's a 2005 tool named "paint.net". Well, it's really good, I just wish more people knew about it!

Judging by the responses to that thread, it seem like this wasn't a very welcome idea. Oh well.

Is there one, and if there isn't, could there be an official PDN Discord server? What are your thoughts on this? It's a relatively small community, I don't think it would be hard to manage one (or finding mods). It would make sharing stuff, asking for help, and just talking about this tool in general much, much easier. And faster. Sometimes I feel like we're stuck in 2007. I get a strange feeling every time I open this forum and see stuff from decades ago pinned...

Oh, and I just noticed that in the first blue paragraph, paint.net is written as "Paint.Net" whereas it's "paint.net" everywhere else. Shouldn't this be fixed too?

Quick report of a bug I notice every time there's an update but always forget to post here... (oops) The Portuguese translation of a lot of text in the following wizard is all messed up, here are the fixes: Original: A instalação de paint.net foi completada com sucesso. Fixed: A instalação do paint.net foi completada com sucesso. Original: Você também pode apoiar o paint.net por ter comprado na loja de Windows. Fixed: Você também pode apoiar o paint.net comprando-o na Microsoft Store. Original: As atualizações são completamente automáticas..--sem mais atualizar avisos, já! Fixed: As atualizações são completamente automáticas. Chega de avisos para atualizar! Although that last green bit is not the most accurate translation from English, it sounds better than the closer "Sem mais avisos de atualização, já!" which has a literal translation "sem mais" (no more) which is not very natural in Portuguese.

Didn't know about that one, @Djisves, thanks! It really seems pretty powerful and useful. Installed it immediately! Unfortunately it suffers from the same curse that all plugins have - everything has to be stuck in a tiny window with sliders for everything. As someone who relies on pixel perfect precision and and fine tuning (which require a lot of zooming and moving around the canvas), sadly I won't be able to use it very often. But thanks for the recommendation anyway!

I see. Thanks!! I'm looking forward to those future big updates Still do wish that we had at least line spacing though... and no auto scrolling. Guess I'll wait ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Hey, In all my years using this excellent program, I've noticed that in comparison to pretty much any image editing software, our text tool in particular, is pretty limited. Like, a little bit TOO limited. I think that it deserves a bit of love. And no, I don't mean straight up rewriting everything and adding text layers since I'm well aware of how much of a technical burden that would be. So here are a few small suggestions of things I think we're lacking, more or less in order of importance/difficulty to implement. Line spacing. To me, this sounds at the same time extremely useful and easy to implement (just a new field in the tool options and some code to move every line by X pixels...). I'm constantly having to write text then manually move lines closer together, which honestly is really tedious, boring and potentially imprecise. Line spacing is found on nearly every single image/text editing tool, and it would make a lot of people's lives easier. Character spacing. Basically the same arguments as line spacing. Not as useful, but probably equally easy to add. Selecting text. I'm not quite sure how hard would this be to implement, but considering every image and text editor ever (including the original Microsoft Paint!) has it, probably not too much. Also would be a really, really useful feature. Having to delete huge blocks of text by holding backspace is not just painfully slow, but also sounds a bit humiliating... Grouped font families. Also unsure how hard this would be to implement, but probably not very. As someone who has hundreds of fonts installed, having to scroll through every single variant of all of them in a single list is really time consuming. Inkscape does it and is open source - if I was the single developer working on PDN, you bet I'd take a look at their code, haha Editing parts of the text independently. This refers to the ability to make certain parts of the text bold, italic, have a different font, text size... This relies on having text selection. If we had this, I honestly might as well kiss Rick on the lips, because it would be INSANELY useful. Scrolling the mouse wheel while changing the font size should snap to the closest value on the list, not the first. Is this even a suggestion or a bug report? Basically, go to the text tool, set the font size to 25 and scroll up on the font size list. It should snap to 24, but it goes all the way back to 8. This is really annoying :^/ The entirety of this topic about auto scrolling. If this was fixed, it would save me hours of stress every week. I don't want to sound demanding or entitled to beg for features, so this small list is just a few minor and easy to implement (I think?) additions that would hopefully make everyone's lives easier while not being too much of a burden on our single developer Thanks for making Paint.NET, and onwards for a great future for this software!