better legibility of mid-level ruler tics when zoomed in

[lklauder]

When zoomed to 200% I find it very hard to distinguish the centimeter ruler 0.1, 0.2, etc tics from the neighboring tics representing values such as 0.095. It would help a lot if the tic lengths assigned for successive zoom values could maintain a visually effective hierarchy. From a coding point of view this ought to be fairly easy.

[Rick Brewster]

It does maintain a visually effective hierarchy. It was well thought out by Tom Jackson when he originally implemented it, and it's worked very well for the years that it's been in place. You may simply need to change the resolution (DPI) in Image->Resize while you are editing the image in order to virtualize a more granular ruler. (i.o.w., set the resolution to 10x, then you'll see 70, 71, ... 79, 80 in place of 7, ...., 8)

From a coding point of view this ought to be fairly easy.

Well hey you're the expert right?

[lklauder]

Thanks for the reply. I appreciate it.

I tried the suggestion of increasing resolution by factor of 10 (from 1200 dpi to 12000 dpi) but as that reduced the physical size by a factor of 10 the problem with being able to distinguish tics became vastly worse (the whole ruler had only one labeled tic). Uping the physical size to compensate takes the ruler tics back to where they were (difficult to discern) but in the process messes up the artwork (resampling was set to bilinear). I cannot go in the other direction (lower resolution) because the lines would then come out poorly in a reduced size printed version.

I attached an image of the ruler in a separate e-mail to you so you could see what I am talking about. (I do not know how to include in this post an image that does not have a URL on the web.).

If the code for the tic lengths is part of a relatively small .cs file that produces its own .dll (so that I could see the results of changes) and if you were interested in letting me look at, I would be happy to see if I could do any good. (I work in VS 2008 and have written code to automatically adjust a distance scale while zooming.)

Background wise, I am comfortable in much of C# and VS but am a novice with respect to raster images.

By the way, thanks for paint.net. I find it to be a wonderful program.

[Rick Brewster]

The ruler simply doesn't print text for tick marks less than 1 whole unit apart.

I mistakenly suggested increasing the resolution, when actually decreasing the resolution was what I meant.

You can always set the DPI back to what you want before saving and printing. It's just a number stored in the file, it doesn't actually affect the pixels. Paint.NET only uses it for printing text to you via the status bar and ruler, and nothing else. Everything internally is measured and computed in terms of pixels.

See david.atwell's write-up on DPI: viewtopic.php?f=34&t=32569

[lklauder]

Thanks. That provides a nice work-around.