There are an increasing number of machines with Wacom compatible screens.
The obvious advantage of those being that you see where you put your pen.
As the Microsoft Surface was quite an success, more producers are hopping
on that train. Huawei Mate springs to mind as a serious contender with a
lot more bang for the buck. I have an old IBM x41 with Wacom sensitive pen
input, but the use is limited because the resolution of the screen is a
mere 1024x768. However, when drawing vectors that doesn't hurt too much.
What does hurt is the absence of a widget to enable all the CTRL SHIFT ALT
DEL keyboard shortcuts and right mouse button actions by pen input. Having
a full keyboard on screen is an option, but that eats pixels.
There are also quite a few Android tablets with pressure sensitive inputs
that you can use in combination with VNC to display your workstation
workspace and then draw away on it with the pen input interface. Samsung
Note slabs are quite useful for that. On f-droid you can find the required
tools for that.
Another place to find them are in the form of white boards in education.
Basically an over-sized Wacom compatible board with a video beamer or
direct large screen layer, though the latter are less sensitive in my
experience. As they are intended for finger input, the resolution of the
input isn't all that great and in combination with a video beamer, the
position of the finger on the screen needs to be calibrated and even then
is always a bit off. Having bigger interaction handles would be useful.
You can already increase the range, but not the visual size.
That said, with the increased screen resolutions of tablets, the case for
using those for illustrators that want to move from paper to unlimited
document sizes and paper supply becomes more appealing. I suggest anyone
interested to walk into a shop and play with the Microsoft surface pen. It
is very responsive and smooth to use and everyone used to drawing can
easily adopt to it. The things get flogged at a rather steep price and tit
comes with MSW 10, so hardly something I can recommend, but the tech is
there to follow.
Finger input may seem useless and can be discarded as irrelevant for most
purposes, but is the way you interact with whiteboards. There you have a
single touch interface, so right mouse button widgets are less than
useful. I can also imagine people starting to use VR inputs in the
foreseeable future. Having a more touch friendly UI will certainly
increase adaptation.
> Message: 1
> Date: Mon, 21 Mar 2016 22:51:28 +0000
> From: C R <cajhne@...400...>
> Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] Inkscape with touch screens?
> To: Brynn <brynn@...3133...>
> Cc: Inkscape-Devel <Inkscape-devel(a)lists.sourceforge.net>
> Message-ID:
> <CABdJpS4ZVquQW5HiF8ndtN_HJ=3No9rhfQsD6StxuLdiXz6gTA@...401...>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
>>
>> So you mean that Inkscape's pressure sensitivity works on a touch
>> screen?
>> You mean like with a stylus, or do you mean using a graphics tablet's
>> pen
>> on the touch screen?
There are tablets and laptops that have Wacom tablet input on top of the
screen surface. So you have a pressure sensitive input with direct visual
response. The x220T and x41 of IBM are early examples of that, but because
they were not very responsive (the drawn object would trail the pen) they
were not all that useful. Anything that used complex calc would take too
long to process by the CPU.
>>
>
> For pressure sensitivity to work *at all* the screen/pen must support it.
> Presently there are no desktop or laptop computers that have
> touch-pressure, so to use pressure at all, you need a stylus, and
> moreover
> you need a stylus that supports pressure sensitivity. Inkscape works with
> Wacom Tablets, which is what most people in the profesional graphics
> world
> use for digital illustration. They also make components for laptop
> screens
> for Lenovo/IBM tablet computers (selected models only). This is what I
> have
> in my x220T. Yes, it works great. :) The stylus can also be used like a
> mouse too, so you can tap-drag control handles, and points, etc. You can
> also do this with your finger on my screen, but, well it sucks. :) For
> the
> benefit of using your fingers comfortably on the interface Inkscape UI
> would have to be re-written with everything large enough, which means you
> can fit less on the screen, which means hiding a lot of options... it's
> just not worth the effort, imho.
It wouldn't be such an effort using GTK3 I would imagine. I don know what
exactly happens to the current icon sets that are SVG objects, but
rescaling them to larger sizes shouldn't be all that difficult I would
think.There would be a trade off for clutter instead of functionality, but
a few recommended settings should help a lot.
> There is nothing to gain except a
> substantially slower workflow, and endless hidden menu navigation to cram
> in everything that makes Inkscape the graphics powerhouse that it is.
That's why I suggest user definable collapsible UI widgets that can be
placed anywhere on the screen or at the edges of it. That way you could
easily create tool sets that use a tool with predefined settings, whereas
the rest of the tools are normally hidden. It would remove the clutter and
greatly increase the workflow if one can single click a pen with different
colour, stroke and width settings as defined by the user or indeed any
other tool, instead of having to go around the menu's as they are now.
The example of how that would look like unfortunately cannot be shared
through e-mail and I have no access to any file sharing service that is
accessible from outside China atm. If you happen to know a place where I
can upload my examples to that is not related to anything blocked in
China, please inform me so I can upload and make a link to it.
>
> There are features that could be added to make Inkscape a better
> illustration program with a stylus, though.
>
> For example:
> 1. Free-canvas view rotation: great for comfort and producing an easier
> stroke without kinking your wrist around. Just pinch-rotate the screen.
Yes, because when you change the orientation of the OS, chances are that
the orientation of your Wacom/Pen input follows are slim. Same with
professional screens that allow you to change the angle 90 degrees. They
often lack driver support for Linux. Having this option in the application
itself would be very useful.
> 2. Pen-button tool palate (Like in Krita)
I don't use Krita, but can imagine this tool to be very helpful.
> 3. Tab to hide everything except the canvas (currently f12 only hides
> dialogues)
F12, Shift +F11 only works if you have those buttons on your keyboard.
Being able to select such options in an alternative way might be helpful.
>
> I think people are probably asking for Inkscape for Android and iOS, but
> the truth of the matter is, neither is a good enough OS/platform for
> Inkscape. Time is better spent ignoring the tablet fad and improving
> Inkscape as a pro-grade desktop application, imho.
Using a tablet as direct interface for pen input makes great sense.
Installing Debian next to your Android and then using Inkscape makes sense
as well. iOS less so as it is a niche platform with a walled garden
software model that is difficult to penetrate. It is the reason why I see
iOS as a failure to happen, but yeah, there are also people voting Trump,
so suckers a plenty.
>
> Maybe when more tablets get stylus support it could happen, but
> finger-fumbling your way through a vector editing program isn't anything
> professional, or even hobbyist artists are going to enjoy very much.
How many professionals have a Wacom? How many stopped using it for the
lack of direct visual return? How many do you think would enjoy having a
tool that addressed that issue? I know at least one.
>
> No, I've never used a touchscreen at all (I never even had a smart phone,
>> much less tablet). (I'm technology-deprived :-p)
>>
I have a smartphone now and am appalled by its limited use. A 4 core cpu,
vastly more powerful than my Pentium machines and it has less tools than a
c64 if unrooted. Surely there are some other people as well that are not
convinced with the format. So obviously there is a demand for more
versatile machines that are not crippled. Some day the modular machine
will happen, there certainly are interesting attempts being made, that go
well beyond the draggable computers of the 1980's.
>
> Okay. :)
>
> -C
>
