Art Pen
So today the Wacom Art Pen arrived -- thanks are due to Cornelius Schumacher, Thorsten Zachmann and Eva Brucherseifer and Axel Jäger who busied themselves with paying, ordering, checking, sending on after a misdelivery! The art pen has a very nice feel on the tablet, a kind of resistance that makes drawing a lot of fun. And there appears to be not a single X11 application that makes use of its rotation feature.
To celebrate the new tablet I have started working again on my Chinese brush simulation. I'm working on the research done by Clara Chan. The Krita version works -- somewhat. The lines the brush bristles draw are not anti-aliased. There is some support for tilt, but not for rotation yet -- which would be quite interesting since rotation of the brush is one the ways to get the right effects when painting in the xiao pin style.
Apart from the cool things we can now develop for the tilt and rotation features there is another thing: the koffice input device architecture goes way beyond what other applications do. In an application like Photoshop or Corel Painter there is only one active tool, no matter which input device you pick up. If you paint freehand with your art pen, and then grab the mouse, click the pan tool, then pick up your art pen again, your art pen pans.
Already with Krita 1.6, you can select the pan tool with your mouse and a paint tool with your stylus. To me, this feels like a very natural style of working. If I paint with real oils, I tend to hold the active brush in my left hand, and in my right hand the palette and a quiver of other brushes of different sizes and with dabs of different colors. If I work with pencil or charcoal, I have a stick of charcoal in one hand and an old cloth in my other hand to soften the lines.
With KOffice 2.0, every input device, even every pen you've got for your wacom has its own tool. So, if you've got an airbrush, a stylus and a mouse, your airbrush can be associated with the freehand tool and the airbrush paintop, your stylus with the freehand tool and the chinese brush paintop and your mouse with the pan tool. And if you've got three styluses, each one can be associated with a certain tool or paintop. Without needing to configure stuff, of course, you can just select tool and paintop by clicking on them. We have already implemented this, but testing with different wacom input devices was a bit hard.
What doesn't work because of an unfortunate but fixable design oversight is having different active colors for different input devices: that would be the ultimate (although expensive) analogy to working with real brushes! (We'll also have to persist the state between sessions, too)