Digital Light & Color

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A couple issues with using pen and tablet with Paint Tool, on dual monitors:

1. Using "pressure controls radius" option, maximum radius is not as large as that which can be obtained with mouse, so how does one get a larger radius with pen? It seems the radius is limited in size, even if the mouse had previously set a larger size.

2. After drawing a stroke, then raising pen from tablet, width of stroke immediately reduces a bit, so WYS is not WYG.

3. Using dual monitors (main on right side, secondary on left - which holds Image Browser and any dialogue boxes), there is a disconnect between pen location and screen(s). If using mouse in main, then pick up and use pen, the pen can't be taken to the secondary monitor, unless pen is clicked in main monitor first (stops at left edge of main monitor), however if pen is clicked anywhere in image on left side of main monitor, pen immediately jumps to far left side of second monitor.

4. Can use pen to click on drop-down boxes in dialogue (secondary monitor) and box drops down, but pen immediately is taken to main monitor. Unable to make drop down choice.

5. If pen is used to click on header of Paint Tool dialogue, that dialogue is immediately moved from secondary to main monitor. Same thing occurs if the Colour Tool dialogue header is clicked on.

Marv

The software interface for pressure-sensitive tablets in Windows is an ancient kludge called WinTab which is flaky and poorly documented. The tablet manufacturer in turns creates a WinTab driver which maps the hardware to the WinTab software interface. Most of the issues you mention are buried inside WinTab or the WinTab driver and beyond my control.

For example, Picture Window maps the range of pressure readings from 0 to 65535 to the full range of radius values. If the hardware does not pass the full range of values through, you will not achieve the maximum radius. Similarly with all the other pressure-related settings.

Thanks for the explanation.

Unfortunately, it makes using a pen a less than perfect experience. But it is what it is, I guess.

Marv

I've been waiting a long time for comments on the use of a stylus/tablet so I could learn how well they work. It looks like I should continue to wait.

Robert,

I suppose it depends on for what purpose you would use a pen and tablet and the configuration of your system.

If you have a single monitor and you do general painting or masking, I have found a pen and tablet (Wacom) very useful, and I was using it on pretty well every project, pre dual-monitors. I did experience some issues with imperfect alignment between pen cursor and adjacent pixels at a significant (2 or 3X and greater) zoomed in view, but that issue has, for the most part, been resolved by Jonathan.

However, I moved to dual monitors a while ago and, as noted in my initial post, now hold the Image Browser and any Transformation dialogue boxes on that second monitor. In this case, as discussed, the pen and tablet don't play very well with two monitors and can be a frustrating experience.

Marv

Thanks for the explanation! WinTab definitely is the plague of pen and tablet users... I guess I'll stick to a single monitor display for the moment, then.