Hurray, I turned my vision into reality after a week of hacking:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6qfqcroUcw

I didn't realize there was an earlier discussion about touchscreen support on 3/18/2016:

http://inkscape.13.x6.nabble.com/Inkscape-with-touch-screens-td4976095.html

Brynn, I know Inkscape already supports pressure pens (used it with my Wacom Bamboo tablet a few years back). I was just saying the usability is poor, especially the difficulty of switching tools. I think there should be a GUI to let you choose a palette of tools to cycle through using the pen buttons. For me, the most important tools in pen mode are pencil, eraser, and tweak.

The touch screen support on Linux is better than on Windows (only recognizes 2 finger zoom). But that's only because the Linux Wacom driver detects more gestures like vertical and horizontal drags and translates them into scroll events. It's very choppy and 1 gesture can only scroll along 1 axis at a time.

You should be able to scroll, zoom, and rotate with a single gesture like in Autodesk Sketchbook. Krita also has it, but not rotation. Once workspace rotation is checked in, I can easily support that using touch.

"The high water mark for pen support in vector drawing is FutureWave's SmartSketch" Are you saying Adobe Illustrator isn't as good if not better? I haven't used either so I don't know what's so good about SmartSketch?

-Yale

On Thu, Dec 22, 2016 at 1:46 PM, brynn <brynn@...3133...> wrote:

Hi Yale, I don't use a tablet, so I can't answer your technical questions. But as far as I understand, Inkscape does have touch and pen support. Maybe you haven't found all the settings yet? As far as I understand from reading other messages about this kind of thing, you need to set the following:

Inkscape Preferences > Input/Output > Input Devices -- Use pressure sensitive tablet -- Switch tool based on tablet device

Edit menu > Input Devices -- Actually I'm not sure what you need to do in this window. Maybe check Pressure Sensitive Tablet? Or maybe some of those options can help??

If you already found all that, then just ignore my comments. I just wanted to mention, just in case you didn't find them yet. Hopefully developers can help to answer your technical questions.

All best, brynn

-----Original Message----- From: Yale Zhang Sent: Thursday, December 22, 2016 10:04 AM To: inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: [Inkscape-devel] touch and tablet support

Any artists out there using Inkscape on a drawing tablet?

I find the lack of touch and pen support very inconvenient for serious, free hand drawing. Does anyone else find this wanting or is working on it? C R, you mentioned it in the discussion of Jabier's workspace rotation.

I'm using a Lenovo P40 with the Bamboo Smart AES pen, which has 2 buttons. I'd like to use the buttons to cycle between certain tools.

Preferably, panning, rotation, and scaling should work like Autodesk Illustrator, using 2 fingers:

scale = Magnitude(p1 - p0) / Magnitude(p1_start - p0_start) rotation = atan2(p1.y - p0.y, p1.x - p0.x) - atan2(p1_start.y - p0_start.y, p1_start.x, p0_start.x) pan = 0.5 * (p0 + p1) - 0.5 * (p0_start + p1_start)

Then single touch should be used to select and move objects. Currently, single touch is indistinguishable from the mouse - stray lines are very annoying (Wacom's palm rejection helps reduce this though). Just like pens, touch should remember the last tool used and switch to it when using it again.

I started implementing these and found GTK 3 has no multi touch support on Windows and the pen support is also flaky - the source of each event is always GDK_SOURCE_MOUSE / "Virtual Core Pointer" instead of GDK_SOURCE_PEN, GDK_SOURCE_ERASER, or GDK_SOURCE_TOUCHSCREEN, meaning the pen can't remember its last used tool separately from the mouse.

For now, I've managed to implement these work arounds:

switch tools: bottom pen button cycles between cursor, pencil, and tweak. Double clicking top button switches to eraser.

pan: hold down top pen button and drag

fingers to zoom - seems the Wacom driver recognizes zoom gestures and translates it into mouse wheel zoom events

-Yale

---

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Will, C R, brynn, or any other touchscreen/pen users,

here's my feature if you want to test it

source code: http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~simdgenius/inkscape/my

Note: touchscreen will not work unless you also have my GTK3 changes. Current GTK3 doesn't have any touch event plumbing for Windows

Windows x64 binaries https://1drv.ms/u/s!AngRQgSreBCehTUxfCmBkdJC66xX

I see you have a nostalgia for Smart Sketch, Will. I have one for DOS also. I know some people who wanted to see BeOS be the next Apple OS instead of OS-X.

Joining separate but almost connected paths would be a great feature. I find it difficult to draw a complete shape in 1 stroke. Currently I have a keyboard shortcut to run an extension to close the last path.

Can SmartSketch recognize emergent shapes? That is, if you draw a square followed by 2 lines to make 4 little squares, can it recognize the 4 little squares and split it into separate paths? This would be very hard but an even more useful feature.

The other thing on my wishlist is true variable stroke width support. I know you can currently fake it by creating 2 paths (1 regular path so that it can be filled and a 2nd clone that uses power stroke) Anyone know how that's coming along?

-Yale

On Tue, Dec 27, 2016 at 8:20 AM, William Adams <will.adams@...3004...> wrote:

Futurewave SmartSketch was the only tool developed for vector drawing with a stylus.

One could draw in a variety of pen shapes and the size of the pen would react to pressure, and when one stopped drawing the resultant paths would be unioned automatically. One could erase portions of a path, or draw over in a different colour and select a mode where the new path would be differenced from the original automatically.

Macromedia Flash has pretty much the same featureset, it's just that I remember SmartSketch with great fondness, and miss installing and using it (16-bit app which I'm not willing to trouble over).

Illustrator now has similar tools, but they feel clunky to me (so does all of Illustrator, and it has since v3.2).

Another notable app to look at is Creaturehouse Expression.

William

On Tue, Dec 27, 2016 at 6:57 AM, Yale Zhang <yzhang1985@...400...> wrote:

...

Hurray, I turned my vision into reality after a week of hacking:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6qfqcroUcw

I didn't realize there was an earlier discussion about touchscreen support on 3/18/2016:

http://inkscape.13.x6.nabble.com/Inkscape-with-touch-screens-td4976095.html

Brynn, I know Inkscape already supports pressure pens (used it with my Wacom Bamboo tablet a few years back). I was just saying the usability is poor, especially the difficulty of switching tools. I think there should be a GUI to let you choose a palette of tools to cycle through using the pen buttons. For me, the most important tools in pen mode are pencil, eraser, and tweak.

The touch screen support on Linux is better than on Windows (only recognizes 2 finger zoom). But that's only because the Linux Wacom driver detects more gestures like vertical and horizontal drags and translates them into scroll events. It's very choppy and 1 gesture can only scroll along 1 axis at a time.

You should be able to scroll, zoom, and rotate with a single gesture like in Autodesk Sketchbook. Krita also has it, but not rotation. Once workspace rotation is checked in, I can easily support that using touch.

"The high water mark for pen support in vector drawing is FutureWave's SmartSketch" Are you saying Adobe Illustrator isn't as good if not better? I haven't used either so I don't know what's so good about SmartSketch?

-Yale

On Thu, Dec 22, 2016 at 1:46 PM, brynn <brynn@...3133...> wrote:

...

Hi Yale, I don't use a tablet, so I can't answer your technical questions. But as far as I understand, Inkscape does have touch and pen support. Maybe you haven't found all the settings yet? As far as I understand from reading other messages about this kind of thing, you need to set the following:

Inkscape Preferences > Input/Output > Input Devices -- Use pressure sensitive tablet -- Switch tool based on tablet device

Edit menu > Input Devices -- Actually I'm not sure what you need to do in this window. Maybe check Pressure Sensitive Tablet? Or maybe some of those options can help??

If you already found all that, then just ignore my comments. I just wanted to mention, just in case you didn't find them yet. Hopefully developers can help to answer your technical questions.

All best, brynn

-----Original Message----- From: Yale Zhang Sent: Thursday, December 22, 2016 10:04 AM To: inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: [Inkscape-devel] touch and tablet support

Any artists out there using Inkscape on a drawing tablet?

I find the lack of touch and pen support very inconvenient for serious, free hand drawing. Does anyone else find this wanting or is working on it? C R, you mentioned it in the discussion of Jabier's workspace rotation.

I'm using a Lenovo P40 with the Bamboo Smart AES pen, which has 2 buttons. I'd like to use the buttons to cycle between certain tools.

Preferably, panning, rotation, and scaling should work like Autodesk Illustrator, using 2 fingers:

scale = Magnitude(p1 - p0) / Magnitude(p1_start - p0_start) rotation = atan2(p1.y - p0.y, p1.x - p0.x) - atan2(p1_start.y - p0_start.y, p1_start.x, p0_start.x) pan = 0.5 * (p0 + p1) - 0.5 * (p0_start + p1_start)

Then single touch should be used to select and move objects. Currently, single touch is indistinguishable from the mouse - stray lines are very annoying (Wacom's palm rejection helps reduce this though). Just like pens, touch should remember the last tool used and switch to it when using it again.

I started implementing these and found GTK 3 has no multi touch support on Windows and the pen support is also flaky - the source of each event is always GDK_SOURCE_MOUSE / "Virtual Core Pointer" instead of GDK_SOURCE_PEN, GDK_SOURCE_ERASER, or GDK_SOURCE_TOUCHSCREEN, meaning the pen can't remember its last used tool separately from the mouse.

For now, I've managed to implement these work arounds:

switch tools: bottom pen button cycles between cursor, pencil, and tweak. Double clicking top button switches to eraser.

pan: hold down top pen button and drag

fingers to zoom - seems the Wacom driver recognizes zoom gestures and translates it into mouse wheel zoom events

-Yale

---

Developer Access Program for Intel Xeon Phi Processors Access to Intel Xeon Phi processor-based developer platforms. With one year of Intel Parallel Studio XE. Training and support from Colfax. Order your platform today.http://sdm.link/intel _______________________________________________ Inkscape-devel mailing list Inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/inkscape-devel

---

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