New in Acorn 8.5:

# New Shape Things
• Arrows have a new style: Bendable. With this option selected in the new Arrow shape palette, you can make your arrows curve across the canvas. We’ve also added the option to have an arrow head at either end of your line (and much rejoicing was had).
• There is a new Shape Processor named Random Location from Circle which will either randomly move all shapes inside, outside, or along the edge of the adjustable circle. This is handy if you are making abstract art or custom wallpapers for your phone or desktop.

# New SVG Things
• The SVG parser for Acorn has been updated to support more element types, styles, and other SVG goodies.
• Text on a path is now supported.
• Embedded images are now supported.
• Poly lines and referenced elements are now supported.
• Improvements to the path importer, now supporting rarely used path instructions.
• Drop shadows on elements are now supported.
• Element transforms have been greatly improved.
• Opening a SVG as a single layer bitmap: Holding down the option key when opening a SVG will render your image as a bitmap. This uses the WebKit (aka, Safari) framework to rasterize the SVG, and it should look just like it does on the web.
• Lots of other little things. Acorn’s importer is much improved, but if you come across a SVG that it can’t import and you think it should, make sure to send it to us: support@flyingmeat.com

# New Other Things
• The Linear Multi-Stop Gradient and Radial Multi-Stop Gradient filters now support a couple of different color interpolations: Document, sRGB, Perceptual (Oklab), and Linear. Oklab is a great choice, and it’s now the default when creating a new filter.
• When exporting an image as TGA you can now set the compression options.
• You can now toggle the window UI by pressing the keys Option-Tab. Pro tip: Did you know pressing the Tab key will toggle all the palettes?
• The RAW Import and New View windows now have overscroll and better zooming capabilities.
• Drop shadows from layer effects are now imported from PSD files, and exported to layered PSD if you have a drop shadow layer style in an Acorn image.
• New “Clear All Measurement Rulers” Action Bar item that will remove all the on canvas measurement rulers.
• Clicking down on your scroll wheel mouse button (if you have one) will now let you pan your image around.

# Other
• Renamed the Shape ▸ Align ▸ “Vertical / Horizontal Distribute Center” menu items to “Vertical / Horizontal Distribute Bounds”, which more accurately reflects what it does.
• New Command Bar actions: Horizontal Distribute Left Edges, Horizontal Distribute Right Edges, Vertical Distribute Top Edges, Vertical Distribute Bottom Edges.
• The Zoom tool now defaults to having the pref “Scrub zoom” turned on. You can change this back to the previous default in the Zoom palette.
• Updated German, French, and Spanish localizations.

# Changes
• General performance improvements with Bézier paths and arrows. And they use less memory now as well (which is awesome because we’re in the middle of a global memory shortage and we need to save all the bits we can).


# Changes in 8.5.1
• Added a Data Merge… menu item to the File ▸ Export menu. (You’ll still need to setup a Data Merge first via the Image ▸ Data Merge Settings… menu item.

# Fixes in 8.5.1
• Fixed a problem where images were no longer opening in tabs.
• The tool palette lays out a little nicer when in full screen and edge to edge canvas is turned on.
• Fixed a problem where the rotation handles for selected shapes were not always showing up.

And more. Check the full release notes on our website.

If you like Acorn, we’d love it if you could take a moment and give it a nice review. It helps Acorn get noticed, which helps everyone in the long run.