The third alpha for paint.net 4.0 is now available! To install it, either use the built-in updater from a previous alpha build or head on over to the forum: http://forums.getpaint.net/index.php?/topic/27553-paintnet-40-alpha-build-5086-is-now-available/

Here’s a list of the changes between the previous alpha build (5064) and this one (5086):

• Text tool
  • Colored fonts are now supported in Windows 8.1 (e.g. Segoe UI Emoji).
  • You can now choose between Smooth, Sharp (Modern), and Sharp (Classic) rendering. These correspond to the DirectWrite’s rendering modes of Outline, Natural Symmetric, and GDI Classic.
  • OpenType/Adobe fonts are now included in the list of fonts.
  • Fixed some layout glitches that caused text to be incorrectly clipped and/or the cursor to appear in the wrong location.
• Selections
  • Drawing a rectangle selection with a fixed ratio followed by a Crop operation was often resulting in an extra row or column of partially transparent pixels.
  • When using aliased selection clipping while zoomed in, the selection was often rendered in the wrong location and/or at the wrong angle.
  • When drawing a rectangle selection, the status bar would always say it had zero area.
  • Selection adjustments would sometimes result in half-pixel alignment of the selection outline.
  • Deselecting via pressing Enter or Escape was not working consistently.
  • Fixed some rendering artifacts when scaling the selection to a small size.
  • Fixed some rendering glitches after pasting when a selection was already active.
• You can now use the middle mouse button for panning at any time.
• Panning via spacebar while a selection tool was active didn’t always show the correct mouse cursor.
• UI text now honors the user’s control panel settings for ClearType and antialiasing of text.
• Edit->Copy now includes the PNG format when initializing the clipboard data, which allows applications like Office to paste with full transparency information.
• The Diagnostics page in the Settings dialog now includes a “Copy to Clipboard” button and a “Open crash log folder” link.
• The Eraser tool now uses the alpha value of the current color.
• Double-clicking the “roll ball” in Rotate/Zoom was not resetting all the values to their defaults.
• Fixed some visual artifacts when using the Line or Curve shape along with certain arrow end caps.
• Ctrl+[ was not reducing the brush size by 5.
• Fixed a crash in the Move and Shape tools when adjusting the rotation anchor while using the Classic theme on Windows 7.
• Some of the new toolbar items didn’t have tooltips.
• When hovering the mouse over a taskbar image, the main window was always showing a blank image for the corresponding tab.
• Fixed a bug in the Colors window where it would incorrectly switch to the Primary color when you clicked on the Hue slider.
• Removed the legacy Ctrl+Alt+0 keyboard shortcut for View->Zoom to Actual Size, which was preventing some characters from working in the Text tool.

Enjoy!