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====== PAnTool ======

**PAnTool** by Dschulle

PAnTool serves to browse through OFP textures and primarily shall help modellers to recycle existing textures in their models. Or formulated differently: not every new model needs a complete new set of textures.

{{ http://pmc.editing.wiki/images/pantool.jpg }}

Additionally PAnTool is capable of converting textures (similar to texview of BIS), supported formats are //PAA/PAC, TGA// and //GIF// textures as those have proved to be handiest.

====== Installation ======

Simply copy the content of this archive in a folder of your choice; the following files are crucial for the programme to run:

<code>
borlndmm.dll
cc3260mt.dll
Pal2Pac.dll
PaNTool.exe
</code>

====== Usage ======

The program is structured as follows: below the menu bar there are several basic buttons like: Open, Save, browser panel on/off, Bookmarks panel on/off, 3 window arrangement buttons, apha channel on/off and colour of Alpha channel

below there are 2 panels named Browser and Bookmarks again beneath there is a preview window. The big window on the right represents the desktop, where you can choose which textures to view or convert.

**Alpha channel on/off**:\\
(It is recommended to have this buttom always turned on). It determines whether alpha channels (tranparent parts) are coloured in the preview window and in the desktop area.

**Alpha channel colour**:\\
Determines by which colour the alpha channel is replaced. The colouration is only of optic nature and does NOT influence the colours of saved textures!

**Browser window**:\\
By clicking on the square next to the 'source directory' field you can choose a folder in which PaNTool finds the stored (pbo'ed respectively) textures.

If you click on one of them in the Browser window, all files are shown in a list beneath that window. By clicking on a texture it is shown in the preview window; double-click opens the texture in the desktop-window.

**Bookmarks window**:\\
Browsers can only show one window at the same time, and you perhaps have ranked some textures as 'not universally usable' before, so you needn't be bothered by them. You have the option to create custom trees of bookmarks, move and manage them.

By right-clicking on the window a pop-up menu appears with the following options: **New Folder**, **Delete**, **One Level up**, **Copy texture name to clipboard**.

**New folder** creates a directory which you can name at will. If you create a new folder in an existing one you can switch it to the same level by clicking **One level up**.

All these funtions are intuitively and with some practice it gets quite handy.

Use Drag & Drop to take over a texture from the browser to a category in the bookmarks window. If you now click on one of these files in the bookmarks window it is previewed in the window on the lower left hand side, by double clicking on it is opened in the desktop-window.

The **Copy texture name to clipboard** function enables you to copy the name of the texture to the clipboard. This is very useful if - for example - [[ofp:tools:oxygen2|O2]] is open at the same time and you want to use the current texture for your model. Before running the program for the first time you should determine the root-directory (**File -> select Addon Dir**) in which your addons are stored. (e.g. if 'Data' and 'O' are subdirectories of "OFP_Files", then choose "OFP_Files" as root dir, NOT "OFP_Files\Data"!)

If this entry is not correct, O2 will not find the data.

**Status bar**:\\
The absolute path of a file, over which the mouse is moved, is shown in the status bar.

**Desktop window**:\\
The arrangement can be adjusted manually or quickly by using the three 'window arrangement' buttons

Also the graphics window has the **Copy texture name to clipboard** function by clicking **RMB**. Optionally it can be activated here with **CTRL-C**.

You can save the texture shown in the active window by clicking on the **Save as** button in the File menu of the top bar, by **RMB -> Save as** or by hitting **CTRL-S**. After the file is saved the saved texture is immediately opened in order to estimate possible quality losses due to compression.

Others:
  * PaNTool can be configured as standard application for paa/pac files.
  * Files can be dragged into PaNTool by drag&drop.

Planned features for upcoming version:
  * improved quality of conversion by implementation of DirectX or the "feersum.endjinn" code
  * Batchprocessing of whole directories

====== Notes ======

New version of PAnTool was planned to be shipped with [[ofp:tools:wrptool|WrpTool]] v1.0 release.

Download [[http://www.pmctactical.org/ofp/downloads/PAnTool.rar|PAnTool.rar]] - 643kb and [[http://www.pmctactical.org/ofp/downloads/PaNTool_v1.4.7z|PaNTool_v1.4.7z]] - 256kb.
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