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@lists.sourceforge.net Message-ID: <CABdJpS4ZVquQW5HiF8ndtN_HJ=3No9rhfQsD6StxuLdiXz6gTA@...401...> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

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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.

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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,

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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