Should Pencil Tool have pencil width toolbar adjustment dropdown like the PaintBrush tool?

[Jonathan Pobst]

I like the idea of the Pencil tool with the ability to adjust it's width as well. Obviously we'd keep the drawing aliased still...what do you guys think?

jpobst February 23, 2010

That sounds good, and trivial to do.

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joehillen February 23, 2010

It is my understanding that the pencil's only purpose is to fill in single pixels. I did not know the pencil was anti-aliased in Pinta until I just tested, but it definitely is not in PDN. I'm not sure if that is desired or if maybe there should be a toggle for that.

If there were a size option for the pencil then it would just be another paintbrush, except square.

This brings up another feature, shaped-brushes. It might be fun to include different brush shapes, such as squares, stars, or whatever.

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jpobst February 23, 2010

The pencil shouldn't be anti-aliased in Pinta, the code says:
g.Antialias = Antialias.None;

PDN does not let you change the pencil size, but PS does. You can make it size 2 to fill in 4 pixels simultaneously, etc.

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jpobst February 23, 2010

Joe and I looked at this together in IRC. The perceived anti-aliasing from the pencil tool is actually caused by zooming. If you export something drawn with Pinta's pencil tool to png and zoom it in better software, you can see it is not anti-aliased.

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jpobst March 01, 2010

It turns out this isn't as trivial as I thought. Due to event compression, we draw a line from your last point to your current point. This line does not represent what you intended a pencil to do when you draw from point a to b.

This will take a more complicated approach so it is getting delayed.

[Jonathan Pobst (jpobst)]

This idea has been migrated to our suggestions site:
http://connect.pinta-project.com/suggestions/131/should-pencil-tool-have-pencil-width-toolbar-adjustment-dropdown-like-the-paintb