willpell
2012-10-19, 09:41 AM
I mentioned in another thread that I've gotten paranoid about file formatting because of having some of my old files destroyed by modern software, with one of the culprits being MsPaint. Having gotten more than a handful of responses on that divergent topic, I'm bringing it here.
Now I'm even more puzzled, because that's exactly the sort of thing I'd expect to be aware of, in general (both because I'm interested in backwards compatibility, and because I too used to edit BMP files in the bad old days of 95), and Microsoft is usually a lot more sensible about upgrading than that. (Silent data loss on open, in particular, is extremely unusual, and would require several horrendous bugs to come together at once.)
Going briefly still further off topic, I might suggest trying something like Paint.NET (http://getpaint.net/) or IrfanView (http://www.irfanview.com/) for this sort of conversion, as those are generally fairly reliable and flexible.
I do use IrfanView for a number of tasks, including cropping and recoloring photos. But it's not a drawing program, and while Paint leaves a metric ton to be desired, it's what I'm used to, and I'm just barely so old and conservative as to be extremely reluctant to adapt to anything new, even if it's demonstrably superior in every way, just because I see nothing unbearably wrong with the situation I've had in the past. I may eventually get over this and try Paintnet, but I'm exactly the kind of person Microsoft was targeting when they bundled programs like Paint in with their software in the first place, and I'm not going to stop being such a person overnight even if I want to.
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So anyway, yeah. If you want to talk about MS Paint or other programs where a modern "improvement" to a program that now doesn't work right (at least not for your purposes) leaves you tearing your hair out, this is like THE totally happening place to be.
Now I'm even more puzzled, because that's exactly the sort of thing I'd expect to be aware of, in general (both because I'm interested in backwards compatibility, and because I too used to edit BMP files in the bad old days of 95), and Microsoft is usually a lot more sensible about upgrading than that. (Silent data loss on open, in particular, is extremely unusual, and would require several horrendous bugs to come together at once.)
Going briefly still further off topic, I might suggest trying something like Paint.NET (http://getpaint.net/) or IrfanView (http://www.irfanview.com/) for this sort of conversion, as those are generally fairly reliable and flexible.
I do use IrfanView for a number of tasks, including cropping and recoloring photos. But it's not a drawing program, and while Paint leaves a metric ton to be desired, it's what I'm used to, and I'm just barely so old and conservative as to be extremely reluctant to adapt to anything new, even if it's demonstrably superior in every way, just because I see nothing unbearably wrong with the situation I've had in the past. I may eventually get over this and try Paintnet, but I'm exactly the kind of person Microsoft was targeting when they bundled programs like Paint in with their software in the first place, and I'm not going to stop being such a person overnight even if I want to.
***********
So anyway, yeah. If you want to talk about MS Paint or other programs where a modern "improvement" to a program that now doesn't work right (at least not for your purposes) leaves you tearing your hair out, this is like THE totally happening place to be.