'Callout Selection' plugin development

[MJW]

1 hour ago, midora said:

But ellipses create tons of data...

 

And there is no selection tool in paint.net where part of the selection is a bezier curve.

 

Large smooth selections certainly can produce tons of data. However, the polygonList can be treated as a (flattened) GraphicsPath, so you can use all the associated methods to transform it, fill it, etc.

[midora]

17 minutes ago, MJW said:

Large smooth selections certainly can produce tons of data. However, the polygonList can be treated as a (flattened) GraphicsPath, so you can use all the associated methods to transform it, fill it, etc.

 

Anyway, I would need a method in the PdnRegion class and will wait. I'm pretty sure this is not top in priority for Rick.

 

[MJW]

1 minute ago, midora said:

Anyway, I would need a method in the PdnRegion class and will wait. I'm pretty sure this is not top in priority for Rick.

 

It seems to me that if you get the selection from the clipboard, as @BoltBait suggested, you don't need any methods added to PdnRegion. The type of class you generate from parsing the clipboard data is up to you.

[midora]

8 hours ago, MJW said:

It seems to me that if you get the selection from the clipboard, as @BoltBait suggested, you don't need any methods added to PdnRegion. The type of class you generate from parsing the clipboard data is up to you.

But there is no mechanism to put the selection to the clipboard when you open a plugin. And asking the user would be  a bad idea. Bad enough to hint for the inverted selection.

[MJW]

2 hours ago, midora said:

And asking the user would be  a bad idea. Bad enough to hint for the inverted selection.

 

Well, it's true that if you reject the requirement that the user copies the selection to the clipboard, the idea of using the clipboard to get the selection is out. I expect if Rick decides to provide the selection path to plugins (as I wish he would) he'll so more directly than by the roundabout method providing  a programmatic method of copying it to the clipboard.

 

(I don't really think requiring the user to copy the selection to the clipboard, then clear the selection is significantly worse than requiring the selection be inverted. It's a trifle more complicated, but at the same time seems to me to be a trifle more logical.)

[midora]

@MJWI guess we agree that plugins should be usable with a minimum of information required to the user. To explain a user to first copy the selection geometry to the clipboard and then remove the selection from the image is much to complex and error prone.

 

My preferred solution would be an additional EffectConfigFlag which allows a plugin to use an inverted logic regarding the selection. But I do not expect that Rick wouldn't support this (there are reasons not to allow it from the basic concepts of paint.net). So I will not ask for 😉.

[midora]

2007: gdi+ questions - how to get a path from a region 😉

 

Unbelievable that Rick still finds the time to support paint.net and not only keeps it running but also adds improvements. Thanks a lot.