The Ideal Pen Friend Draws A Keen Following
Sydney Morning Herald
Monday November 30, 1992
IT'S not always clear whether the pen is really mightier than the sword, but it sure beats the living daylights out of a mouse.
The electronic mouse is an engaging little gadget. It has changed the way we interact with computers, making them easier to deal with and even fun to operate. For many people it has opened up new productive areas of their lives
As a device for pointing at objects on screen and selecting them with a click of a button, it has no equal. Rival gizmos ... trackballs, joysticks, roller bars ... find favour in the restricted areas of notebook computers, but on the more expansive real estate of the executive desktop, the mouse reigns supreme.
However mice - or as Gareth Powell prefers to call the electronic species, mouses (such are the benefits of a Welsh education) - are often called upon to do double duty. In painting and drawing programs they must handle the job of the painter's brush or pen. And, as many thousands of hapless computer users have discovered, painting with a mouse is rather akin to painting with a housebrick. Precise it ain't: when it comes to drawing, the mouse is an electronic klutz.
If you really want to draw good-looking designs on your computer screen, there is an alternative: an electronic drawing tablet and pen. Once the preserve of high-end graphic arts professionals and draftspeople, these devices are getting cheaper and better. Some models are now well within the reach of home users.
Well-known graphics tablets for the Apple Macintosh come from CalComp, Wacom and Summagraphics, with prices starting around $700. The tablets are about the size of an A4 sheet of paper, with more expensive models at A3(tabloid newspaper) size.
The best have pens that are cordless and pressure-sensitive: that is, the harder you press, the firmer the line you produce. Just like a real-life pen: the ink-powered, unelectronic variety.
You can use the tablet and pen to produce original drawings. Or you can place a drawing, a sketch or a photograph on the tablet, and use the pen to trace the outlines.
Software converts the movement of the pen - detected by an electromagnetic grid of conductors embedded beneath the tablet's surface - into digital information that is fed into the computer: a process known as digitising.
Once displayed on screen, the digitised illustration can be edited, manipulated, imported into other programs - to enliven a word processing document or a newsletter page-layout, for instance.
When you use a pressure-sensitive pen with more advanced software like Fractal Designs' Painter, you can get an amazing range of subtle brush effects: even produce colour pictures that look as though they were painted with the distinctive styles of Van Gogh or Seurat.
You can also achieve wondrous pastel water-colour effects and simulated charcoal or air-brushing, as used by the pros.
At the office where your correspondent toils daily, we have recently acquired a CalComp DrawingPad II tablet. It's there for work purposes: we want to produce line drawings for use in a newspaper which is delivered by fax, and for which normal photographs are not suitable.
As it turns out, the DrawingPad is the most popular new gadget we've taken on board in years - everyone wants to try their hand at electronic drawing or painting.
The CalComp tablet is A4 sized, though the actual working area occupies only a bit over half this area: it corresponds to a Mac screen. It draws power from a small transformer and connects to a Mac through either the printer or modem port.
The tablet has feet which unfold to give a good working slope. It's lightweight and easily moved: you can balance it on your knees if you prefer.
The pressure-sensitive pen is about the size of a normal ballpoint or felt-nib model. It acts both as a mouse - for pointing and "clicking" - or as a drawing device.
The pen has a thin plastic tip, which acts like a mouse button for drawing activities: press down on the tablet and it activates.
A little rocker button is mounted on the side of the pen. It's a second mouse button, something that's needed more by IBM-compatible PC users than in the Macintosh world, where one-button mice are the norm.
However it falls very nicely under the index finger and is handy for double clicking. The barrel of the pen contains a small battery to power the signals that enable the tablet to track the pen's progress.
The tablet does this with great accuracy. It has a resolution of 40 lines per millimetre, or around 1,000 per inch, though you really need a special device called a "puck" - a mouse with a clear window and cross hairs - to get this level of precision.
Drawing with the pen is accurate enough for most users, but it takes a little practice. Unlike an ink-type pen, which is held at a slope, the CalComp pen needs to be perpendicular to the tablet's surface for greatest accuracy.
Disconcertingly, too, there's a slight lag between "drawing" a line, and seeing it appear on screen. The delay is only a fraction of a second but, until you get used to it, this can lead to a little uncertainty and consequent wavering of the line.
Practice, as in pen-and-paper drawing, makes near-perfect.
The tablet has a row of 18 small icons along the top edge. These can be used to store macros - strings of frequently used commands - which can be recalled at a touch of the penpoint. To do this, you need an extra software package: CE Software's QuicKeys is the most popular.
The pen and tablet can be used with most drawing and painting programs like MacDraw Pro, Canvas, SuperPaint, and Illustrator, as well as the photo-retouching program Adobe PhotoShop. Only a few, however, so far support the pressure-sensitive feature; these include UltraPaint, the latest version of Freehand (version 3.1) and PhotoShop as well as the wondrous Painter.
Use of the DrawingPad with any of these programs is a tremendous advance. The pen feels quite natural and the appearance of thick and thin strokes and special effects brings new freedom and flexibility to electronic painting and drawing.
You really begin to feel like an artist, rather than a technician.
No drawing tablet can turn you into an instant artist, of course, any more than a set of brushes and palette can. For that you need some natural talent and a lot of practice. But practising on DrawingPad is a lot of fun. It's hard to drag people away.
This is an exceptional tool with serious uses in the fields of desktop publishing, graphic arts, computer-aided design and engineering professions, as well as the home studio. We recommend it highly.
The CalComp DrawingPad sells for a list price of $627, which includes tax. Professional users who are able to escape sales tax can expect to pay around$550. It works with a Macintosh II, SE, LC, Classic, Portable, Quadra or PowerBook, but not the Mac Plus or earlier models. There are versions which work with IBM-compatible computers.
CalComp is part of the giant US-based Lockheed group. The local subsidiary, CalComp Australia, is on (02) 550 3933.
© 1992 Sydney Morning Herald