The reluctant pen

[NovelT]

ArtRage has become my favorite all-purpose drawing program, and due to my paying job I like to use it to make technical drawings.

Sadly, writing in ArtRage doesn't work so well:

thereluctantpen.png

I have a Toshiba TabletPC, and ink works fine in other applications. Upon reading the "Artifacts when drawing on my tabletPC" thread, I tried uninstalling the Wacom driver, but the result is the same:

thereluctantpen2.png

I hope that this is an issue that can or will eventually be resolved.

[AndyRage]

Thanks for the feedback.
One of the challenges we've faced with ArtRage is that the technology behind the strokes is not like other digital painting applications.

In general (but not exclusively), digital paint applications use a method similar to our airbrush tool to do paint application. And if we just tweaked the edge falloff of the airbrush a fraction, it would be almost indisinguishable from the basic painting tools of most other applications.

ArtRage has to do more work than that - the stroke has to interact with paint already on the canvas and the head of the tool. A simple 'dab based' stroke engine just couldn't give us the results we wanted. It looked too digital. So we use a rendered spline path instead.
That presents a whole new set of problems - most notable being what to do about tight corners and stroke reversals. Writing is unfortunately *full* of tight corners and stroke reversals - the area where rendered path stroke engines fail most noticibly.

As always, we keep working on and tweaking the stroke engine. In the upcoming release there are a few tweaks that might improve the situation. Also, note that if you 'zoom in' to the canvas to, say, 200%, you can get finer lettering.

[NovelT]

I definitely think the "realism" factor is ArtRage's greatest draw, and should not be sacrificed. Airbrush will do for writing, at least for my sundry exploits. Most people probably don't care for writing much in a painting program anyway. ;-) On the topic of idle wishes: an "opague" setting for airbrush would solve all my writing problems. I don't forsee an avalanche of votes for this though.

Anyway, can't wait for the latest bestest,

NovelT

[DaveRage]

I'm glad we're not using -my- handwriting as an example!