idea for a plugin

[khamblin]

hello, i have an idea for a plugin, i don''t know how to make them so here it is.

it would be really cool to have something, that in your page, you could select a few characters, letters, numbers whatever, and have them spread randomly throughout the page.

i don't know if it's allrady created, but this would be neat.

thanks.

[drakaan]

Well, it wouldn't be too tough to randomly place tiled areas of the screen in other places, but Paint.NET doesn't see text as groupings of characters, just as pixels (once you've typed them and changed tools).

You could get something like this to work, but only if you used a monospaced font and knew the starting location of the text and the overall size that each character takes up.

Typical proportionally-spaced fonts wouldn't work, since they don't fit neatly into an evenly-spaced grid.

In order for this to work, first, Paint.NET's internals would have to be rewritten to have a concept of text as some type of text "object", and then to allow for that object to be split up and the pieces manipulated individually.

To make a long story short, it's not possible in the current version 3.x series, at least not for proportional fonts, and even for monospaced fonts, you'd need 4 sliders in the interface (start x, start y, grid x, grid y) to be able to make it work.

That said, some kind of screen shuffling plugin is an interesting idea, and even *I* might even be able to write something like that...not too much math, just random numbers and an array or two...hmm...

[khamblin]

cool, so you think you'll be able to do that?

when do you think that you would be done that?

thanks

[drakaan]

Not sure...I started doing a pseudocode version on paper today. Provided I get some free time, I might have something by late tomorrow...it'll just shuffle the screen in different-sized tiles, and it'll probably only work on rectangular selections...I'm not a plugin guru.

I'll post the codelab online for others to improve, though.