A WishList for the Future of Acorn?

Hello, I’ve been using Acorn for 1.5 years now and just love it. Came over from Photoshop, and never has a program solved so many of the problems I was hoping for a graphic program to solve. I’ve got a list of requests for new features, or if I’ve messed up somehow, corrections on things I’m doing wrong.

I’m using Version 7.3b2 (16159) on a fully updated Mac Studio running Mac OS 12.6.

  1. First of all, if there’s a way to define text styles (including filters) so I have them handy when I need them, I’m not finding it. I often need to make memes, or make fake subtitles for anime and would love to have styles pre-made. Please tell me if I am missing this somewhere.

1.1. Since there seem to be no customizable text styles, I got into the habit of hiding a pre-formatted text clip inside a document I was using, below the main layer. But checking these text boxes now, they seem to be non-editable (rasterized). Is there a reason this would have happened?

  1. One of the biggest difficulties coming to Acorn from Photoshop was the lack of an Auto Select Layer option, which essentially allows you to be doing something (text or whatever) but by holding command and clicking an element, you select that whole layer. Would something like this be able to be considered in the future?

  2. There appears to be no Paste and Match Style available in the program?

  3. There appears to be no way to draw an arrow?

  4. One of the biggest requests I would like to make (and have made) is to have a way to customize the tool keypresses. It was nice in Photoshop to be able to customize things so they were more logical, and no multiple presses were required to get tools I needed to come up.

  1. It’s quite often that Acorn will open my document and it will be zoomed “strangely,” either with the image tiny in a large window, or with the window made too small and the workspace zoomed way up. Does anyone else notice this kind of issue? The image is quiet large, but is displayed very small, as if I’d zoomed it out on purpose or something.

Hello Peter, comments inline below:

There is a way, but it’s non obvious (and from … Acorn 1.0 I believe). If you use Acorn’s Help ▸ Open Acorn’s App Support Folder menu item, a folder will open up in the Finder, and there’s a sub folder in there called “Text Styles”. If you open that, you can make a copy of one of those rtf files in there, open it up in Text Edit, and change the style to how you’d like. Then save it and restart Acorn. The “preset” will then show up under the Edit ▸ Text Style menu in Acorn and can be used on selected text.

Did you save the image as a .acorn file? That’s Acorn’s native format, and what you’ll need to save images as to preserve editable text.

Acorn does have auto-select for layers (when using the move tool), and you can turn that off in prefs (and then use the Command key to temporarily turn it on). But, I’m guessing that’s not exactly what you’re after?

Could you maybe explain a bit more what you’re trying to accomplish so I can understand it better?

There is, but it’s located in the Command Bar. You can press Command-Shift-O to bring it up, and then autocomplete “paste text without formatting” or just “PTWF” for short, and the command will come up. The next build will include the text “Match Style” in it as well.

There’s an arrow tool you can use. Let me know if that doesn’t work for you.

That’ll have to be something for me to look into for a future release.

I believe this is because you already have a window open at a particular size, and you’ve got the pref to use tabs turned on. So Acorn will open up a small image, and open it at 100%, but then it’ll match the size of the other window open so it fits nicely together within the tabs. Does that make sense?

Thanks for the reply, sorry I took so long to get back.

For the text styles, I see how that works. It’s helpful, but optimally it would also allow us to set dropshadow, text color and so on, so really able to select meme fonts, fake anime subtitles, or other things as we can do in Photoshop layer styles.

For the non-editable fonts, yes I always save as .acorn for files I’m working on. It probably had to do something with the file being loaded and saved a bazillion times.

I do use auto select when I have the move tool on. I guess typing V to select the move tool isn’t any different from holding command to switch into move layer mode, in the end.

Totally missed the arrow tool, thanks!

Is there a way to toggle tabs? I can’t find it in preferences.

Do you mean you want to toggle between open tabs (which you can do using the shortcuts under the window menu), or you can turn off tabs with the “Prefer tabs:” preference under Acorn’s General preferences pane.

-gus