Ugly ink from Vista+Intuos3/Cintiq - please help!

[symphonic1985]

Ergh, sorry for the disappearance everyone. I thought the thread had
died, and in the meantime Thunderbird stopped working with livemail and
I didn't realise there were more posts!

Ok, first of all thanks for the screenshot tfeston. I'll be sure to get in touch with you to try and get to the bottom of this.

I've
attached a screenshot from Windows Journal. What happens in Journal
and Inkseine (also Word I think) is that I see the high frequency noise
in the pen strokes as I'm writing ... they are then smoothed in chunks
in real time and you end up with a picture like below. Notice there's
still a fair bit of noise in the writing which is noticeable when blown
up. The red writing is from the Snipping Tool, which looks like One note.

When writing in Journal on a Tablet PC is it normal to have the ink smooth before your eyes (i.e. a noticable amount?)

Re:flash. I've checked that the tablet features are indeed enabled in Vista. Was hoping I'd overlooked it!

I
should mention that I've also checked this on my g/f's laptop with
Vista as well... I was hoping the 6.08-04 drivers would help but still
the same on that front too.

Bruce, I would love if you could
post an image of your external tablet's ink (and the model). I also
have (both system and USER) wisptis running.

I'm happy to keep
digging because this problem is stopping me from using Onenote with my
tablet, which was one of the main reasons I bought it!

I can
post loads more screenshots I've made as well... from Artrage,
Sketchbook Pro, etc. What happens there is that if you don't stop
Vista handling the ink you get subpar results. You have to use a
no_ink.inf file in Artrage and run Sketchbook in Windows 2000
compatibility mode. So line quality with the wintab API is smooth.[img]uploads/3483/windowsjournal.PNG[/img]




Edited by: symphonic1985

[BruceCr_ms]

Sorry for the delay. I'm geting the thread going again at work. Thanks for the replies so far. WISPTIS seems to be running for people, so that's not the issue.

Bruce

[BruceCr_ms]

I'm on a new team at Microsoft, so I no longer have a TabletOS machine. I have one computer running WindowsXP and the ink is actually smoother in OneNote than Paint when I use my external digitizing tablet. It's a Wacom Intuos model GD-0608-U. This is the same digitizer I used earlier in testing and didn't see the problem.

Bruce

[symphonic1985]

Thanks Bruce.

I'll be getting in touch with tfeston in the next day or so to see what's going on at Wacom. Since I was seeing these problems on different computers and across the internet I figured there was no solution...

[symphonic1985]

I'm emailed tfeston and I'm currently waiting to hear back. In the meantime, I noticed this person is talking about the same ink problems in XP Tablet Edition when they run it through a virtual machine. http://www.technologyquestions.com/t...chine-ink.html

Their tablet's ink then behaves as if drawn by the mouse. With my Wacom Intuos in Vista, I'd agree - drawing with the pen and mouse looks more or less the same.

Could it be that the Wacom Virtual HID really isn't working right here, and the tablet input is being treated as a mouse only?

[hinata4]

The same thing happens to me too with my bamboo fun. :-( It really sucks because I bought it for handwriting, and it's really ugly in one note and the tablet pc input panel.. In word and journal, like you said, I write and it's all jaggy, then it slowly smooths itself out as I write, and it's really frustrating. Even after it smooths itself out, it still looks ugly, not even like my handwriting at all. I've used other external handwriting tools before and the writing was excellent. Hopefully you can find a fix for this.^_^ It's really a shame because wacom advertises it for vista handwriting when there are known problems with it.

[symphonic1985]

Yeah the advertising is very misleading. I looked carefully at the images on the Wacom website and I think all their ink is from tablet pcs - even in the Bamboo section.

I've bugged them more but don't get much in return. It's certainly a driver problem. I have an X60t tablet now and I was able to recreate the shoddy ink by installing the Penabled driver and turning off press and hold and pen flicks in Vista. The computer then treated the input just like what I see from the Intuos - equally jagged. When I uninstalled the driver, it was back to being smooth.

Something is broken in their virtual HID, since the ink clearly isn't getting any smoothing.

[hinata4]

Yeah I've bugged them too but later they just ignore me or don't reply.[img]smileys/smiley19.gif[/img] I especially feel sorry for those who bought bamboo because they were the ones who wanted it solely for handwriting. it aggravates me that WACOM would false advertise like that, but since I'm pretty much know that they are not going to do anything about it, I am at least voicing my opinion who people who are thinking about buying the tablet with a review on Amazon and pictures of their shoddy ink quality.

I found a bit of a painful workaround for one note: If you zoom in a lot and write, it comes up very nice and smooth. Then zoom out and everything you've written looks nice. But it's a bit pointless to zoom in all the time so I don't know of how much help that could be.

[symphonic1985]

My brother has my intuos at the moment, but see if I can try that trick this weekend. I toyed with the idea of using Evernote but the inking cursor really annoyed me. Now I think the best note taking option for an external tablet is to use Inkseine (and get at least a little post processing smoothing).

I've also been toying with Sketchbook Pro (they have a free offer for students). It has that nice tablet interface and if you run in Win2000 compatibility mode the ink is very smooth. Of course you then need to set up background canvases with lines and some kind of notebook system...

All in all we've been duped! It shouldn't be so hard. I'm thinking of getting e.g. Genius to send me a sample of inking from their tablets.

[ScottR68]

In Pen Control Panel, if you turn off press to right click OR flicks, you will solve the problem. There was a bug in Vista and Wacom could only help users avoid the bug by making a weird rule that if both press to right click AND flicks are turned on, data was no longer pushed up through wisptisp... Micrsoft has since solved the problem with SP1 and Wacom is in process of updating drivers to respond to Microsoft's fix. It's a difficult problem to try to describe, but hopefully this info helps...