Clipping Masks, Typography Panel, and More

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Fog Panther v0.4.0 delivers a substantial update with new editing capabilities, an improved text workflow, and expanded non-destructive adjustment options. This release adds clipping masks, text spacing controls, five new adjustment layer types, a dedicated Typography panel, and a canvas grid overlay.

New Features

Clipping Masks - Layers can now be clipped to the alpha of the layer below, restricting their visibility to the base layer's content. This is essential for PSD compatibility and a standard feature in professional image editing workflows. Multiple consecutive layers can share the same base, and clipped adjustment layers affect only the base content. Full PSD and FOG format roundtrip support is included.

Typography Panel - A new sidebar panel houses all text formatting controls: font picker with large preview, style selector, bold/italic/underline/strikethrough toggles, text color with eyedropper, horizontal and vertical alignment, plus the new tracking and leading controls. The panel auto-shows when the Text tool is selected and is toggleable via the Panels menu.

Letter-Spacing & Line-Spacing - Two fundamental text controls that were previously missing. Letter spacing (tracking) adjusts the space between characters; line spacing (leading) controls the height between lines. Both are stored per-text-object and preserved in the FOG format.

Expanded Adjustment Layers - Five new non-destructive adjustment layer types join the existing Levels, Curves, and Hue/Saturation:

• Brightness/Contrast
• Exposure
• Vibrance
• Color Balance (with Shadows/Midtones/Highlights tone ranges)
• Invert

Each includes a live-preview edit dialog with zero-mark sliders and snap-to-zero behavior. The Hue/Saturation dialog now features a color spectrum on the hue slider. All types support layer masks, opacity, blend modes, and clipping.

Grid Overlay - A toggleable grid drawn over the canvas at configurable spacing (default 50px). The grid auto-hides at low zoom when lines would be too close together, stays within document bounds, and persists across sessions. Accessible from View > Grid.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed double text rendering during editing (compositor and tool overlay both drew the same text object simultaneously)
• Fixed text position shifting between edit mode and committed rendering at non-100% zoom levels, caused by resolution-dependent hinting
• Fixed Convert to Pixels producing shifted or clipped glyphs by adding padded render surface and matching font rendering options
• Fixed potential application hang on window close caused by autosave timers firing during widget teardown
• Fixed GTK popover finalization warnings when switching between text objects in the Typography panel

UI Polish

• Zero-mark indicators and snap-to-zero on all centered sliders across adjustment layer dialogs (Hue, Saturation, Lightness, Brightness, Contrast, Exposure, Vibrance, Color Balance)
• Hue slider displays the full color spectrum as a gradient
• Levels dialog shows center tick marks on input histogram and output gradient areas, with snap-to-midpoint on gamma and output drags
• Adjustment layer icons in the layer panel for all 8 types

Compatibility

• PSD import now reads clipping mask byte (previously parsed but discarded)
• PSD export now writes clipping mask state
• FOG format stores clipping, letter spacing, line spacing, and all new adjustment layer types with backward-compatible defaults
• Undo system correctly handles all new properties including text alignment, vertical alignment, auto-size, letter spacing, and line spacing (fixes pre-existing gap in copy_text_object_state)

System Requirements

• Linux with GTK4 (>= 4.10)
• Available as Flatpak, Snap, .deb, .rpm, and Arch packages