MS Paint Backward Compatibility Issues

[willpell]

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.

Originally Posted by tuggyne

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 or IrfanView 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.

[Domochevsky]

Old programs... i'm still using ACDSee 4. No idea to what version they're up to now. And i can't find a more modern program that does exactly the same, for image viewing purposes.

[willpell]

In vaguely related news, my mom once found an obsure presentation-making program (on a floppy disk but in a jewel-case, figure that out), by the name of SnapGraphx, in a thrift store for like a dollar, bought it for me on the basis that it was $1 and you couldn't go wrong there, and it has turned out to be one of the most basically useful tools for making organizational charts for games and such I could have thought to ask for. Doubtless some modern programs have better options, but I don't need the extra moving parts to confuse me; it works well for my purposes, and its very obscurity just ensures I never have to worry about it upgrading itself and therefore defying my expectations for how I can continue to use it. Nigh-ideal for my purposes, and an utter stroke of dumb luck. (My life is absolutely filled with this sort of serendipity; it has rather given me the impression that planning and forethought are counterproductive.)

[willpell]

(Silent data loss on open, in particular, is extremely unusual, and would require several horrendous bugs to come together at once.)

It's not data loss so much as data bloat...like having every word in a book have three other words spliced into the middle of it ("For in that sleep/rest/snooze/relaxation of death/demise/extinction/putrefication, what dreams/fantasies/visions/nightmares may come/arrive/appear/be-revealed"). The problem is that modern software does not appear to value elegant sparseness; everything has to be bigger and more complicated today, even when that's inappropriate.

[nedz]

I had a problem with MS Paint.

I was updating some of my old maps and discovered that MS Paint now dithers its fonts, and unless your background colour is white it gets this wrong. You can fix this by flood filling your work area, unless your target area has multiple background colours - in which case you have to break out the pixel editor. This creates maps with different text styles which is far from ideal - very annoying.

The solution should be to just copy the old .exe across from your old system, and it should just run. I haven't tried this yes, must get around to it.