• Right-click on the object layer in the Layers palette, and choose Convert to Path in the context menu.
• From the Objects menu, choose Convert to Path.
• Right-click on the object itself, and choose Convert to Path in the context menu.

Now click on the Edit Mode icon on the Tool Options palette   , or switch to the Pen tool, and you're in Node Edit mode.

1. Choose the script from the Select Script drop-list on the Script toolbar.
2. Click the Run Selected Script button to run the script on the selected image.
3. Make another image active.
4. Choose Edit...Repeat (or press CTRL + Y) to run the script on that image.

Repeat steps 3 and 4 until all images have been processed.

Note: You can also run the script on another open image by dragging its action (see red arrow below) from the History palette and dropping it onto the image.

To run the script on all open images:

1. Choose the script from the Select Script drop-list on the Script toolbar.
2. Click the Run Selected Script button to run the script on the selected image.
3. Right-click on the script action in the History palette and choose 'Apply to other open documents' from the context menu.

1. Click the Run Script button to open the Run Script dialog box.
2. Browse to the folder that contains the script you want to run.
3. Select the script.
4. Select the playback mode in the 'Run script' drop-list in the lower left corner of the dialog box.
5. Click Open to run the script.

Note: Scripts can be run from any folder. However, scripts located in folders not defined to PSP will always run as restricted scripts.

If you are using the file tree view, right-clicking and choosing Refresh Tree, or pressing CTRL + F5, will refresh the folders on the right as well as the thumbnails. The file tree view can be toggled on and off using the Folders button on the Browser toolbar.

1. The Browser is initially docked along the lower edge of the screen.
2. The image is opened from the Browser, and NOT using File...Open.

Therefore, if you use File...Open to open your image, do not expect the Browser to move out of your way at all - instead, the image will be opened at a lower magnification so it fits above the Browser. And if your Browser is floating or docked anywhere besides the bottom of the screen, you will see no change in its size or position at all when you open an image using File...Open.

If you really want to get the Browser out of the way when it's not in use, click on the Auto Hide pushpin so that it is pointing to the left:

This causes the Browser palette to roll up when you click away from it, so that only the title bar (if the palette is floating) or a label (for docked palettes) is visible. If the Browser palette is docked on the bottom of the screen, as in the default configuration, here's what you will see if you choose to auto hide the palette:

To display the palette again, just place your cursor over the tab (or the title bar for floating palettes).

• When there is no raster data below the vector layer(s), drag with the Pick tool around the objects.
• If there is raster data below the vector layer(s) at the point where you click to start the bounding box, the Pick tool will move to the Raster layer that contains that data. To prevent this from happening, hold down the SHIFT key while dragging with the Pick tool around the objects. Alternately, while holding down the SHIFT key, click on each vector object you want to include in the selection, either on the image itself, or in the Layers palette.

  Note: Be careful when dragging the bounding box that it totally surrounds all vector objects you want in the selection. Objects only partially surrounded will not be included in the final selection. If the size and location of the vector objects makes it impractical to draw a bounding box that surrounds all of them, use the click on objects method described above to add more objects to the selection. In addition, if an object gets included in the selection that you want removed, hold down the SHIFT key and click on that object in the Layers palette to remove it from the selection.

from PSPApp import *
def ScriptProperties():
       return {
             'Author': u'',
             'Copyright': u'',
             'Description': u'',
             'Host': u'Paint Shop Pro X',
             'Host Version': u'10.00'
             }

def Do(Environment):
       import webbrowser
       url = r'C:\PSP\PSPX Files\CommandAPI-PSPX'
       webbrowser.open(url = url, new = 1)

When the above script is run on my system, it will open a browser with the API doc. Bind this script to one of the script icons in Customize, and then assign it to a shortcut key, and you have the API open at the click of a key. On my system, I've assigned this script to "6" on the keyboard, so all I have to do is hit the 6 key and I'm looking at the Scripting API. This is a nifty little script which comes from the hand of the incomparable Gary Barton - way cool, Gary!

1. Apply the tanning effect with the Makeover tool in Suntan Mode.
2. Switch to and use another tool.

   Note: This "trick" will not work unless you both switch to another tool and use that tool. You can always undo the action you take. I often switch to the Magic Wand tool, make a selection, and then undo that action (CTRL + Z).

3. Switch back to the Makeover tool and reapply the tan - it will darken the original tan.

C:\PSP\

Within that folder, I have a folder for Tubes, one for Plugins, one for PSP 9 files, and one that contains all the goodies from releases of PSP prior to PSP X. Each of these folders contains folders for all those PSP goodies, like Textures and Gradients and Patterns, etc. Now, when I use the File Locations dialog, I can see the entire folder name without having to click on each one.

This takes a bit of reorganization to start out, but it's worth the effort to be able to read the folder names at a glance.

You can tell PSP you've done this, too, during the install. When the installation asks about placing shortcuts on your desktop and your Quick Launch bar, look for a button near the bottom of the window labeled "Advanced Options." Click that to get a dialog in which you can change the location where Corel PSP X will save your personally created files - now PSP knows where your user files are to be found.

Note: You can record a script of yourself adding all the individual folders to File Locations. Then, if you have to reinstall PSP, you can run this script, and all your resources will be available to you.

• First, uninstalling PSP X may remove those files without warning.
• Second, more than one user account can run PSP X, keeping the users' resources separate through the Windows XP convention of "C:\Documents and Settings\user-name\..." Storing files under Program Files violates this convention, commingling files of different users. Microsoft discourages storing user-created files here for these reasons. Windows Vista in its present beta release prohibits it.

There are several things to notice about the above image:

1. The duplicate images are listed, with the location of each.
2. Only part of the location path is visible.
3. The text states that some of the duplicate items will not be available.
4. The text also states that this warning will not be repeated.
5. There's a 'Copy list to clipboard' button at the bottom of the dialog.

The warnings are important. The first time PSP finds duplicate images when it is loading cache, it lists them for you. Then PSP continues building the cache, but only maintains one of the duplicate images in the cache. Thus, as the warning says (#3 above), some of the duplicate images will not be available. Corel does not state which ones are retained and which are dropped, but quite often I find the last one read in is the one that's retained, and all other duplicates are dropped. However, this is not a rule. What does matter is that you have images with duplicate names, which may or may not be duplicate images, and these images are not available to you.

The second significant part of the warning is that the warning will not be repeated (#4 above). The next time you open PSP, if you have NEW duplicate images, those will be listed, but the duplicates that were listed the last time the warning message was issued will no longer be listed, even if you have not taken care of them. So, it behooves you to take care of the problems when you are alerted to them.

The third significant item to notice in this pop-up is that even though the location of the duplicates is listed (#1 above), the exact location of the duplicate files is "cut off" (#2 above). Even if you wanted to take care of them, you don't have enough information to do it.

Enter the 'Copy list to clipboard' button (#5 above). Whenever I get "Duplicate images" warnings, I immediately click on that 'Copy list to clipboard' button to save the list. Then I go to My PSP Files, to a folder I've added called "Duplicates", and create a text file with the name of the type of duplicates I need to research - in this case, I would call the text file tubesx.txt, where the "x" is just a number to distinguish this file from the other lists of tube files I might have in there.

Perhaps an image will make this clearer. This screen shot shows the My PSP Files folder on my system, with my added Duplicates folder (red arrow), and its contents (blue arrow):

Notice I have a couple of tube lists already in the folder. When I "clean them up", I rename them with a "z" preceding the name. You may want to just delete them. I created one called tubes3.txt for this instance, and opened it, pasting the information I'd saved to the clipboard when I clicked the 'Copy list to clipboard' button. Here's what I now have in the tubes3.txt file - for clarity, I've bolded the duplicate file name, highlighted the complete path to the duplicate in green, and highlighted the full name of the tube in red:

$roundbars C:\Documents and Settings\Suz\My Documents\My PSP Files\Picture Tubes\$roundbars.PspTube
$roundbars C:\Documents and Settings\Suz\My Documents\My PSP Files\Picture Tubes\$roundbars.tub
$roundbars C:\PSP\Tubes\$$\$roundbars.tub
$roundbars C:\PSP\Tubes\$roundbars.tub

Quite often I find I have one tube with the extension .tub, and one with the newer .PspTube extension when I find duplicates. This is the case for the first two tubes, both in the same location with different extensions. The other two tubes have the same name, but are located in different folders. The resolution to this problem is to check out the four tubes, and delete the duplicates. If the tubes are really different images with the same name, renaming one of them is the solution.

In summary, then, here's what to do when you are alerted to duplicate images:

1. Click on the 'Copy list to clipboard' button.
2. Open My PSP Files.
3. Create a Duplicates folder, or open the Duplicates folder if you've already created one.
4. Create a text file for the list you just copied (choose File...New...Text Document), such as masks1.txt, tubes1.txt, etc.
5. Open the text file.
6. Paste the list in (choose Edit...Paste, or CTRL+V).

Using the PSP browser to compare the duplicates, you can either rename one of them (if they're different items with the same name) or delete one of them if they are just plain duplicates. It takes a little time to clean this up, but it's worth it to eliminate those messages and get to all your tubes and masks and patterns, etc.

Which brings us to three important issues that need to be addressed:

1. Maybe you've seen those messages before, but you're no longer getting them - however you've noticed that some of your tubes/masks/patterns, etc., are still unavailable.
2. What about shapes - how do you eliminate duplicate shapes?
3. Plugins do not generate a list of duplicates, though there can be many of those out there.

These three issues will be addressed in the following three tips.

1. Choose File...Preferences...Reset Preferences.
2. In the Reset the Application dialog, CHECK the "Delete all cache files" checkbox.
3. Click the OK button.
4. Exit PSP. The cache files will be deleted.
5. Restart PSP. The cache files will be rebuilt as needed.

You'll get messages about duplicate Patterns, Gradients, Textures and Swatches as PSP is initializing, because those cache files are built as PSP sets up the Materials palette. Other cache files are built as they are needed - for instance, when you choose a painting tool, the Brushes cache file is rebuilt, and when you choose to add or save a mask, the Mask cache file is rebuilt.

Now that you're getting those messages again, save each list as described in the article above, and then research and remove or rename the duplicate files.

To delete duplicate shapes, you have to start with the shape library name. For example, I had this in my duplicates list recently:

Box C:\Documents and Settings\Suz\My Documents\My PSP8 Files\Preset Shapes\More Shapes.jsl
Box C:\Program Files\Jasc Software Inc\Paint Shop Pro 8\Preset Shapes\Shapes 01.PspShape

This tells me that a shape called Box exists in two different shape libraries:

• One called More Shapes.jsl in My PSP8 Files, and
• One called Shapes01.PspShape in the Jasc PSP 8 folder.

To eliminate these duplicates, you have to either delete one of these libraries, or open one of them and delete or rename the Box layer. Looking at the two libraries, each of which contained 40 shapes, I determined they were duplicate libraries, so I could delete the entire More Shapes.jsl library, which I had copied from PSP 7.

To delete an individual shape from a library:

1. Open the library in PSP (I use the Browser to find the library I'm looking for).
2. Delete the sublayer that contains the duplicate.
3. Save the shape library again.

Note: If the duplicately named layer is not really a duplicate, but just a duplicate name, rename the sublayer to a unique name.

In either case, once you've changed a shape library, you MUST reset your cache, as described above. Otherwise, the changes may not take effect and the Shapes cache may be invalid. If you do not want to reset all your cache files, but just the Shapes cache file, just close PSP, find the cache files, and manually delete the Shapes cache file (called Shapes.PspCache).

Note: To find your cache files, choose File...Preferences...File Locations, click on Cache in the left window, and note the Cache file folder name in the right window.

For instance, a recent search for radtrans.8bf on my system produced the following list:

RadTrans.8bf - in the DSBFLUX folder
RADTRANS.8BF - in the Visual Manipulations folder
radtrans.8bf - in the VM folder

PSP will only retain one of these - in my case, it was the one in the VM folder - and any attempt to get to the others will be unsuccessful. If a script tries to access one of the "unlisted" plugins, it will fail with a "JascApp.InvalidCommandName: Invalid or missing command" error. Resolution? Rename all three files:

RadTrans.8bf - became RadTrans1.8bf
RADTRANS.8BF - became RADTRANS2.8BF
radtrans.8bf - became radtrans3.8bf

Now all my Radial Transmissions plugins are available.

Note: The external file name for the plugins does not matter to PSP. It uses information stored internally within the plugin file to list it in the Plugin list, not the external name. Therefore, it does no harm to rename your plugins this way!

There's no easy way to identify these duplicates before the problems occur. The best time is to notice it when it happens - you're trying to use a certain plugin, you can see it in the PSP Plugins folder, but it's not showing up in PSP. When that happens, search for duplicates and resolve by renaming. Note that the plugin cache seems to have a very long memory, and even when you rename the plugins and restart PSP, sometimes the problems persist. I always delete the cache files and let them rebuild whenever I have to rename plugins. If you want to delete just the plugin cache files, they're the ones called PSPPFCachV8F.PspCache and PSPPLCachV8F.PspCache in the Cache folder.

That should just about cover the topic. I hope these tips about duplicate images help you clean up your system, and keep it running smoothly.