0.9.18 - Magic Tools turned into plug-ins, Pango text rendering
Features
Tux Paint stands apart from typical graphics editing software that it was designed to be usable by children as young as 3 years of age. The user interface is meant to be intuitive, and utilizes icons, audible feedback and textual hints to help explain how the software works. The brightly colored interface, sound effects and cartoon mascot are meant to engage children. Tux Paint's normal interface is split into five sections:
Toolbox, containing the various basic tools and application controls
Information area, where instructions, tips and encouragement are provided
A simple slideshow feature allows previously saved images to be displayed as a basic flip-book animation or as a slide presentation.
Basic drawing tools
Like most popular graphics editing and composition tools, Tux Paint includes a paintbrush, an eraser, and tools to draw lines, polygonal shapes and text. Tux Paint provides multiple levels of undo and redo, allowing accidental or unwanted changes to be removed while editing a picture.
Files and printing
Tux Paint was designed in such a way that the user does not need to understand the underlying operating system or how to deal with files. The "Save" and "Open" commands were designed to mimic those of software for personal digital assistant devices, such as the Palm handheld. When one saves a picture in Tux Paint, they do not need to provide a file name or browse for where to place it. When one goes to open a previously saved picture, a collection of thumbnails of saved images is shown. Similarly, printing is typically a 'no questions asked' process, as well.
Advanced drawing tools
Tux Paint includes a number of 'filters' and 'special effects' which can be applied to a drawing, such as blurring, fading, and making the picture look as though it was drawn in chalk on pavement. These are available through the 'Magic' tool in Tux Paint. Starting with version 0.9.18, Tux Paint's 'Magic' tools are built as plugins that are loaded at runtime and use a CAPI specifically for creating such tools. A large collection of artwork and photographic imagery are also available, and may be placed inside drawings using Tux Paint's "Rubber Stamp" tool. Stamps can be in either raster format, or as vector graphics on many platforms Tux Paint supports. As of mid-2008, over 800 stamps are included in the stamps collection.
Parental and teacher controls
As features are added to Tux Paint, configuration options have been added that allow parents and teachers to disable features and alter the behavior to better suit their children's or students' needs, or to better integrate the software in their home or school computing environment. Typical options, such as enabling or disabling sound effects and full-screen mode are available. There are also options that help make Tux Paint suitable for younger or disabled children, such as displaying text using only uppercase letters or ignoring the distinction between buttons on the mouse.
Localization
Tux Paint has been translated into numerous languages, and has support for the display of text in languages that use non-Latin character sets, such as Japanese, Greek, or Telugu. As of June 2008, over 80 languages are supported. Correct support for complex languages requires Pango. Sound effects and descriptive sounds for stamp imagery can also be localized. Tux Paint includes its own form of input method support, allowing entry of non-Latin characters using the 'Text' tool. Japanese, Korean and Traditional Chinese are currently supported.
Distribution
Tux Paint is included with the software that comes with the ASUS Eee PC. It is also a standard package in educationally oriented Linux distributions, such as Debian Jr. and Edubuntu, as an optional package in numerous other Linux distributions, as well as part of numerous educationally oriented Linux Live CDs. It is included in various software collections for Windows, as well as in portable software collections for Windows, since it can be run as a stand-alone application. Tux Paint is also available as an activity within the free and open source educational suite GCompris.
