Pen Tablet vs. Mouse for digitizing sketches

[John Lovaas]

Just curious-

When I first started making cave maps, I didn't think I could live without a pen tablet- so I bought one.

When I took a cartography class, the instructor taught me how to use the Pen/Bezier Curve tool(it's a Pen tool in Freehand, not sure in Illustrator or Corel or ....) to digitize cave sketch data.

Now, I have almost no use for a pen tablet. I will say that drawing breakdown(I prefer drawing breakdown vs. "rubberstamping" or cloning it) might be faster with a pen tablet.

Just curious about map maker's opinions out there. Not sure it merits a survey- my posts are generally buzzkillers.

jl

[Roppelcaver]

I prefer a tablet.

I have tried both, and never thought it to be a close call.

A mouse can tend to have more irregularities, due to mechanical issues or the fact that the mouse driver is often used by multiple devices concurrently.

But, if the mouse works for you, then that is your best choice.

I use Adobe Ilustrator and have note that program settings can have a dramatic affect on the perceived sensitivity of the mouse/pen.

[Aaron Addison]

I think that Jim is right, it depends on what you have spent time learning and what works best for you. One notable development in the world of the "mouse" (no, not the Disney one), is the laser mouse.

While not a super hero, it does provide amazing control over the pointing device when drawing, thus eliminating much of the "jitters" seen with tradional mice or even optical versions.

Of course the best of both worlds seems to be the screen/tablet combos sold by the likes of Wacom. These tablets allow you to draw right on the screen with a digitizer pen.

AA

[Spike]

Acording to my mother I have Doctor's Handwriting, so I don't try to freehand anything at all. I use Xara and a mouse using the freehand tool. I mearly click and place nodes and let Xara choose the shape of the spline. The splines are right on 90% of the time. If not I just adjust the weight bars to fit. I am by no means fast using a mouse, but I don't see digital drafting as a way to speed up the process. It allows me to make a map that looks exactly the way I think it should without any mistakes. My wife thinks I'm too slow. I told her to start drafing maps of her own, we have plenty of work to do. I have an in-progress map online, missing text and cross-sections at

http://web.umr.edu/~jcrews/progress.jpg

Spike

[John Lovaas]

Aaron- I should have said- laser mouse.

Working with a "roller ball" mouse was a nightmare for me, what with food crumbs and such ;-) A laser mouse is a dream.

My prof's argument for using a bezier curve tool(in our case, we were working with Freehand's Pen tool), was that you could fit the curve very precisely to the source line, and could do so with a minimal number of nodes. I know Freehand(and I'm guessing at Illustrator) has a finite limit to how many nodes a document can hold. It might be 250,000 or so.

Of course, I haven't met anyone who has ever run out of nodes in a Freehand or Illustrator document. Must be a spectacular error message if you do- like winning some kind of video game ;-)

I should point out that my cartography instructor has been working since the pre-digital days, when one would use a graver, or other such cutting tool, on litho film. So from a dexterity standpoint, it is a short jump to using a mouse with a bezier curve tool.

My experience with a pen tablet in Freehand(used in concert with the Pencil tool) is that there is a compromise between nice smooth curves that don't quite match up with the source line, and ever so slightly "ragged" lines that contain a large number of nodes.

I know- get the damned map finished; that's what ultimately counts!

[hewhocaves]

I have a tablet PC which I am currently using to do a map on in Illustrator. There's a fair amount of learning curve there which makes it very annoying (it would have been done ages ago on paper and pen).

Now that I can use the giant scanners at WVU, I'm half tempted to just draw it by hand and scan it. But then I'm very comfortable at drawing.

As for the Tablet PC, (Toshiba portege) when I got it I figured it would be the most wonderful thing ever. I do like it, but it hasn't changed my life. Interestingly, I find it more suited for reading .pdf files and online journals in their vertical orientation than anything else. The drawing tools are nice, but so... different. And they have yet to make an electronic pen which feels anywhere near as intuitive as a real pen.

I'm 34 years old and already crochety. lol.

John

[rchrds]

I have to agree with the above John- for many years I have drawn all my maps with pen and pencil- I like the stippling effects I can make with pen for very small details, and I tend to be very small detail oriented. The unfortunate part to drawing in pen/pencil, was that there is no really good way to scale a sketch to your final drawing size- particularly if they are quite different. (as might be the case for a very large or very small cave.) I had managed to get around it by scanning my sketches and sort of printing to scale- matching my print size with my final scale. This worked to some extent, and was usually accurate enough for the final map, which is, lets face it, mostly artwork around accurate points. My most recent map has been in Illustrator. The learning curve has been kicking my ass, but I am finally getting somewhere. I like to look to Brent Aulenbach's Illustrator maps for ideas and inspiration- he is gifted with Illustrator. In fact, I have completely ripped him off with the grey background and white topo lines behind the cave maps. Great way to offset the map. I also had to purchase a Wacom tablet to help with the detail drawing- the settings in Illustrator do make a huge difference- almost as much as the size of the drawing you start with- I try to get my point layout as large as possible, so I can use multi-point line weights instead of decimal line weights.

Jason

[cavemanjonny]

As far as imperfect lines because of shaky mouses, bezier curves are the way to go! You don't have to freehand the line, just be able to click a couple times and adjust the control points until the curve matches the line you sketched.

The nicest thing about beziers, I think, is that they are infinitely scalable. They aren't rasterized bitmap objects like a line drawn in with a tablet. They are mathematically defined so you can blow them up or shrink them down as much as you want and you won't lose one bit of information. Raster objects will get shot to hell if you resize them a couple times.

That is the principle Therion works on, btw. Everything is defined using vectors, no raster data. Makes rescaling the map and adjust for loop closures (without having to redraft) no trouble at all.

[rchrds]

The nicest thing about beziers, I think, is that they are infinitely scalable. They aren't rasterized bitmap objects like a line drawn in with a tablet. They are mathematically defined so you can blow them up or shrink them down as much as you want and you won't lose one bit of information. Raster objects will get shot to hell if you resize them a couple times.

Of course, this is the reason for using Illustrator, which is a vector drawing program, rather than Photoshop, which is somewhat similar, but a raster based program. Any line that you hand draw is infinately scalable- no wierdo problems with resizing. For example- I will print a full scale map on 24x36 sheet (getting ripped off at FEDEX/Kinkos) and then I will remove all the floor and ceiling detail (unclick the layer visibility on both layers) and then with only the wall layer still visible, zoom out and print it to a 8.5x11 sheet for the TCS. No detail is lost in the wall layers- its just smaller.

Jason

[Martin Sluka]

The tablet (or tablet) PC is much better than mouse for ANY drawing on computer.

For example- I will print a full scale map on 24x36 sheet (getting ripped off at FEDEX/Kinkos) and then I will remove all the floor and ceiling detail (unclick the layer visibility on both layers) and then with only the wall layer still visible, zoom out and print it to a 8.5x11 sheet for the TCS. No detail is lost in the wall layers- its just smaller.
Jason

And in therion:

symbol-hide group all
symbol-show line wall
#etc. etc. according to symbol names or symbol groups.

scale 1 2000

And more - it will change the width of wall lines according to scale parameters. So you may print out it in really small scale and the walls still be visible.

[cavemanjonny]

I just got a wacom tablet. Entering data, even if it is simply choosing bezier anchor points, should be much smoother and more natural. I can't wait!

[steelwool]

wacom tablet run under linux?

[cavemanjonny]

wacom tablet run under linux?

Yep, works great! The tablet itself is more or less plug and play with newer stock kernels, but will be missing a lot of features. The Linux Wacom Project has drivers that will basically intercept any Wacom devices before they get handed off to the generic HID subsystem. The LWP supports pressure sensitivity and tilt and other things which regular HID doesn't. It's pretty cool at any rate, and worth the trouble to get working.

http://linuxwacom.sourceforge.net/

[steelwool]

Have you used it with therion? If so, how well does it work?

[cavemanjonny]

Have you used it with therion? If so, how well does it work?

I haven't gotten around to using it specifically in Therion yet, no. Since I've gotten it I've mostly been using it in GIMP. It is infinitely easier to do just about everything with the tablet than a mouse. I have much better control.

I'm not aware of Therion having special features designed to take advantage of a tablet, but I would imagine it would still be much more comfortable to correlate stations, walls, formations, etc. on your sketch using the tablet. It is much more natural. I don't get the fatigue that I get from constantly using the mouse. Well worth getting one, I'd say.