Stencil Management and Text Formating

[Somerset]

Hi Artragers, Developers and Users!

In the past days I made some experiments with Stencils. A verry cool feature! Especially for old Airbrushers like me. But I think, you should pimp it a bit. It would be nice, if there would be a dock that shows up all Stencils, that are opened in a painting (even those, that are invisible) and from where you can chose wich one you want to use and wich ones you don't. At the moment it is a bit tricky to handle more than one Stencil at a time. For example: you just can make all invisible Stencils visble - not a single one.

And there is another thing, I noticed yesterday: I dragged a Stencil onto the canvas, painted with it and added it to the Tool-Box to use it again later. Than I deleted it from the canvas. And, as I remarked, it was also deleted from the Tool-Box too. I think, that doesn't make sense. I'm not shure if this is the way it should be. Maybe a bug?

And I have another suggestion refering to the Text-Tool. Artrage is a wonderful Software to make amazing things with text. But the tool is a bit limited. It would be nice if there would be a few more opportunities to format text. Especially the distance between signs and rows.

Finally: please excuse my german way to rape the englisch language!

[Somerset]

I have one additional idea for the Stencil-Management. It would be nice if there would be a function to place the stencils exactly by numerical x- and y- coordinates, so that it is easier to place the stencils seamless.

[markw]

Hi Somerset
The Stencils panel can be Docked or Floated as desired.
At the top of the Stencils panel is the ‘Active’ tab which will show you all the stencils currently being used and their Visible states.
Hovering over a stencil's thumbnail will bring up a Menu icon for further action for that stencil.

The Toolbox question is an interesting one? And I too think it might be a bug.
Add a stencil to a toolbox and then save that toolbox to disk.
Then remove said stencil from the painting and it disappears from the toolbox. OK, not ideal but I can sort of live with that.
But now if you reload the toolbox you just saved containing the stencil, it should be in there again, but it isn’t? That shouldn’t happen, and it doesn’t happen for other brushes etc…
Worth reporting.

As for the text tool, well for me personally, I don’t see Text as an area that AR should overly focus on. For me it’s primary focus should be as a real media paint simulation program.
I tend to use text in AR as temporary filler text, and then use another program if there is a lot of text to do.
But don’t get me wrong, any improvements made to the Text tool would be greatly appreciated!

Giving X, Y, cordinates for stencils? I like that, could be useful.

[Somerset]

Hi markw!

Many thanx for the hint on the "Active"-Tab. I missed such function for so long - and, damn, it was already there! That's cool!!!

The other points: Yes they are not really important. It's no catastrophe that stencils get lost from the tool box. It just caused some irritation to me as I noticed it. And yes: text ist not the most interesting thing concerning painting software or other pixel based programs. Except for logos, headlines, decorative stuff... And you can help yourself by formating the text in another program like Inkscape or so, and import it as a bitmap or a stencil. No big deal. But it could be nice if you could do the whole work in Artrage. Even because you can do verry nice things with text in Artrage. A text tool that doesn't allow formating text, is in fact almost useless for many fonts. But you are right: that is not a verry important issue.

Whereas, exact positioning of stencils could be verry helpful, I think. I sometimes try to combine stencils, so that they are continuing their textures. And that is often a bit tricky if you have to do it manually. Because of that, stencils I create by myself, always get small marks on the edges, so it is a bit easier to position them by using guidelines. But it is often not easy to do this seamless.