Trying to Switch to Pixelmator Pro Full Time -- But Some Questions

Talk about Pixelmator Pro, share tips & tricks, tutorials, and other resources.
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2023-08-29 05:33:23

Hello! Kudos to making such a great product for Mac and iOS. I have used Pixelmator and Pixelmator Pro casually for occasional use, but when the time came to wean myself off of Photoshop for day-to-day image editing, I went with Acorn because it did more of what I needed. Now I'm checking to see if the recent 2 years of feature updates have made it time to switch to Pixelmator Pro for my daily driver. But I have some questions.

THANK YOU for supporting Applescript. That's so important for a power user like me! Also, I love that auto-select of layers is a thing. Acorn never got around to supporting that. Also, thanks for letting me open the image in its native format (you know the one), rather than forcing me to

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First, I saw discussions to the effect that Stroke outside pixels did not work in the past, but has been a thing ever since version 1.6 or so. That's good, but my main goal is to make and edit memes, which means having accurate access to text styles like Photoshop which can be Stroked along the outside of text (unlike the default, the upper text image). I notice I can convert to pixels then stroke, but then I can't edit the text ever. Is there anything I'm missing with regards to stroking editable text along the outside?

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A related issue: since I use the same text styles a lot to re-create anime subtitles or the "meme font" having things like Stroke or Shadow being part of the text style is rather important. Any consideration of this would be great. The goal is to have 6-8 text fonts I can use to easily style text I need for a meme for a blog post or whatever.

A small thing, I was using Keyboard Maestro to make keyboard shortcuts to menus so they work closer to what I'm already used to. I noticed there's no "Delete Layer" option in any logical place (actually there's no Layers menu). There is a Delete option inside Edit which deletes the layer, but it's somewhat non-logical.

Typing + and - to zoom in or out zooms "too much." A setting for how much to zoom in in preferences would be neat, as otherwise my image is too small or too big.

I assume "content-based filling" isn't a thing yet? It never got implemented by Acorn either, I guess it's hard to get this feature right. Using clone is not impossible but just checking in.

Final request: is there a way to customize keys for tools? I am used to certain keys and re-learning is always a challenge. I still press keys for options for programs I haven't used in 8+ years because my brain can never totally un-learn a thing, it seems.

EDIT: Forgot one more question. The ability to open GIF and videos are great. I am often taking a too-long video clip and cutting out the parts I need to omit in Quicktime using the Split Clip comment. It looks like currently I can only trim a single clip's start/end point but not clip out anything from the middle?

EDIT: Oops, one more small observation. When making a new image, the default established by many other programs is that if there's an image in the clipboard, it will assume we want to create a new document set to those dimensions. This is a selectable option in Pixelmator Pro, but not the default. Perhaps there should be a "use this option in the future" check box or something?