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The text tool deserves a bit more love


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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 spacingBasically the same arguments as line spacing. Not as useful, but probably equally easy to add.
  • Selecting textI'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 scrollingIf 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!

Edited by HCGS
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It does need some love, that's certainly a good way to put it

 

I want to upgrade the Text tool before moving onto some other big upgrades, but it's got a few other big projects in front of it. Upgraded brushes, pressure sensitivity, and porting to .NET Core, for instance. But it's on the short list of big projects I'm planning to tackle. 

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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!

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  • 3 months later...
On 10/17/2020 at 8:48 PM, HCGS said:

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!

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.

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