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_nick_caylor_
Participant
January 29, 2009
Question

N-Trig Tablet Not Recognized

  • January 29, 2009
  • 40 replies
  • 54665 views
A few other HP and Dell tablet PC users and I have noticed that photoshop does not recognize the pressure sensitivity of the N-trig tablets. I bought this laptop thinking that it was Wacom because I knew it was pressure sensitive (which it is on a couple other programs) so I was a little surprised when I found out that there was more than one type of digitizer pen.

Is there a work around, patch or some other way to get Photoshop and Elements to recognize it?

I contacted N-Trig already and they basically said it's the software's issue.
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    40 replies

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    Chris Cox
    Chris Cox
    Legend
    February 6, 2009
    I suspect the SDK example is using the more limited pressure API, not the "kitchen sink and more" API designed to deal with things like pen angle, rotation, etc. Yes, Microsoft has multiple API hooks for tablets.
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    _Smartweb_Studios_
    Participating Frequently
    February 6, 2009
    In the Windows SDK tablet examples the N-Trig digitizer is able to produce varying line thickness based on sensitivity. Do you think these Windows SDK tablet examples are using the API you are talking about or are these two completely different things? I'm sorry if I am way off here, it just seems like it shouldn't be that hard to come up with a way to get the pressure sensitivity to work in Photoshop if pressure sensitivity works in the Windows SDK examples and in the different Microsoft applications. Thanks for being so patient. I am very new to this type of application work.
    Chris Cox
    Chris Cox
    Legend
    February 6, 2009
    You can't feed it directly to Photoshop - you have to implement the tablet driver code that feeds the values to the Windows tablet APIs, which Photoshop then uses to get the information.
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    _Smartweb_Studios_
    Participating Frequently
    February 5, 2009
    I have downloaded the latest version of the Windows SDK and am looking over the various tablet examples that are available. I am not very familiar with .net, but I believe that I am capable of eventually getting a program running that can generate x/y values for the pen location and a reading of the pressure sensitivity. If I am able to get this program running, how would I go about feeding this information into Photoshop so that is is compliant with the pen pressure brush settings? I appreciate all of the help you have provided so far. You guys are much more helpful than the N-Trig support staff. Thanks!
    Chris Cox
    Chris Cox
    Legend
    February 5, 2009
    Not easily - you'd have to patch into the Windows tablet drivers to supply the pressure and other information correctly. (location comes from that API or just mouse coordinates)

    If N-trig published documentation on their hardware, it would be possible for someone else to write a driver that correctly communicates with the Windows tablet and mouse APIs.

    Of course, it would be fastest if N-trig fixed their own driver.
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    _Smartweb_Studios_
    Participating Frequently
    February 5, 2009
    Hi. I just recently purchased this same laptop as well and feel let down by N-trig. Since hearing from other users in the same situation that N-trig believes it is an Adobe issue, I have started looking into developing a workaround to allow N-trig users to still use pen pressure in Photoshop. Hypothetically, do you believe it would be possible to develop a .net application to read the x/y coordinates of the digitizer and the pen pressure value, and then somehow communicate them to Photoshop? I have looked into the Tablet PC SDK examples and pen pressure works fine on these, so it seems that as long as I could find a way to have the program run in the background, and have Photoshop interpret these values, it should hypothetically be possible. What are your thoughts? Thanks!
    D
    D__McCahill
    Known Participant
    January 30, 2009
    Dunno if you will get it to work. As Chris said, Photoshop wrote generic links, and Wacom made their device work with them. (Not Adobe working to the Wacom standard). If N-Trig is not interested in doing the same, then you are out of luck.
    Chris Cox
    Chris Cox
    Legend
    January 30, 2009
    Photoshop's tablet support is generic - supporting any tablet that writes to Windows standards.

    You'll have to talk to HP or N-Trig about why their drivers do not work.
    T
    TheoWerewolf
    Participating Frequently
    June 30, 2009

    Chris, let me start by introducing myself and my qualifications. I'm doing this to make sure you understand that I'm not a user who has a complaint - but someone who actually write commercial applications and drivers. I've been a programmer for 35 years. I've worked on products with Apple, Microsoft, Seagate, Broderbund, The Learning Company, Teradici, Madentec and many other companies. I've written software from firmware for hardware to OS components to hardware drivers to..well pretty much everything.

    And yes, I've written graphics applications.

    So, let me start by saying that after going through this very long, very trying thread, I have to say there's a whole lot of not-listening going on.

    Let's start with one of your statements.

    "Photoshop's tablet support is generic - supporting any tablet that writes to Windows standards."

    Actually, as you admit later, Photoshop's tablet support is WinTab. WinTab is not 'generic' and isn't a standard component for Windows, it's a third party library created by The Logic Group that has to be licensed. Moreover,  The Windows standard for tablets isn't WinTab, it's the Ink API that was introduced for Tablet PC.

    You've commented that the Ink API isn't robust or expressive enough for Adobe. You've received two different responses to that: that it's expressive enough for the vast majority of your users (which is true - the vast majority of Wacom tablets don't provide tilt, for example, so requiring it isn't really meaningful), and that they'd be happy with a partial implementation.

    You've discounted this. I can see Adobe's side on this in that supporting two entirely different API for the same interfaces would be a pain - but there IS a very simple solution. I'll come back to this shortly.

    You're suggesting that the 'correct' answer is for nTrig to support WinTab. There's two problems with this.

    First, Microsoft is a heavy investor in nTrig and want to use their technology as the showcase for Windows 7 and multitouch. I think it's unlikely that they'll be encouraged to support WinTab. But more importantly, Ink API has changed a LOT since TabletPC came out in 2003. Even in 2005 it had been expanded to include most of what WinTab offers. The Win7 version of Ink API is a very rich API and more importantly - it IS the 'Windows standard' now and Adobe has had two years to get ready for it.

    Let me repeat this: Ink API *is* the Windows standard. Not WinTab. For the simple reason that Ink ships with the OS and WinTab doesn't.

    I understand your frustration with Microsoft's on again off again support for system API, but nonetheless, it has shipped since 2003 on Tablet PC systems and since 2007 with Vista and is shipping with Win7. That means it's been supported for six years. I think it's time to consider that it's going to be around for a while.

    BUT...

    In the end, there are two groups who can solve this: nTrig or Adobe. I would argue that regardless of 'fault', Adobe should take the intiative for two simple reasons:

    - InkAPI is the future. InkAPI comes with the OS and more and more apps will support it trivially and more and more tablets and tablet PCs will avoid having to license WinTab because InkAPI is the foundation of multitouch on the PC.

    - It shows commitment to the customer. We, as customers, don't care WHY we can't use Photoshop - we just know we can't. You can say 'it's the fault of the tablet maker', but that argument falls apart when we use other apps that actually DO use the Windows Ink API standard... and CAN use pressure (and multitouch for that matter). Either we're hallucinating or you're wrong. It's just that simple.

    Which brings us to the simple solution:

    Write a bridge module that acts like WinTab, but takes input from InkAPI. Include it with Photoshop. End of problem.

    Heck, I have most of one written and at least one other company was including a similar product with their tablet. The problem we keep running into is how Adobe *uses* the WinTab library. It keeps breaking every new version. If YOU guys wrote the bridge - you could keep it in sync.

    The conflict is going to be simple. A growing number of tablet computers are going to be showing up that are incompatible with Adobe products. People LIKE drawing on their screens - it's a very natural way to do it and Wacom is no longer the only source of pen technology. They aren't going to rearrange their products to support WinTab because they don't need to. Windows has its own free and standard API.

    It's up to Adobe to catch up.

    Oh, and one other thought... it's really bad form to swear at your customers. If you feel like swearing, you might consider taking a break and handing off the discussion to someone else for a bit while you calm down.

    Cheers.

    Chris Cox
    Chris Cox
    Legend
    June 30, 2009

    How nice of you to read the entire thread before commenting.

    Since you did read it, you'll notice that at no point did I swear at anyone.

    And because you read the entire thread, you understand that WinTab is the existing standard for tablet support:  because it is the API used by all the tablet makers (until quite recently), and is still the only available tablet API that supports anything beyond the basics, or is even extensible.  Whether that standard was created by Microsoft or some other party does not matter - not all standards are created by the OS Vendors (in fact, most are not).

    And just because something ships with the OS does not make it a standard (I shouldn't have to repeat the long list of failed Microsoft API attempts here, you've been in the industry long enough to see them come and go).

    The tablet support in Photoshop is generic -- there is nothing in the Photoshop code that ties it to a specific brand or model in any way.  If a tablet implements the API correctly, it works with Photoshop.  If Photoshop has a problem in the API usage, the tablet vendors (well, most of them) are good about talking to us and resolving the problem quickly.

    Towards the end of the thread, you already read that we have taken the initiative and we are trying to support the Microsoft tablet API.  You also saw that we have been talking to Microsoft about the tablet API since it was created (though usually to remind them to fix bugs and that we needed improvements to make it a useful API).  Microsoft has responded to many of our requests and bug reports, but not all.  We're still not sure how much support we can provide using the Microsoft tablet API, or how much the user may have to give up if they use that API.

    And you read enough to see things from Adobe's perspective:   we supported the API that everyone used; we didn't see any reason to support a new API that couldn't provide the same functionality that we already supported (even discounting the bugs); the new tablet vendors didn't want to support the standard API; and the new tablet vendors didn't contact Adobe to tell them about this lack of support (or respond to requests for contact, which I still find very odd).  Based on the information we had at the time, Adobe made all the right choices.  Now the available information has changed, and now we're responding to the change.  If someone had contacted Adobe with that additional information earlier, maybe the change could have happened sooner.

    And thank you for noticing that I have been listening the entire time and trying to reach some common understanding.  Unfortunately some people posting in this thread have not been willing to consider another viewpoint, or unwilling to accept that not every problem can be fixed instantly in the exact way they wish.

    P.S. Adobe's usage of Wintab is very simple, and there is no reason it should break with each version.  The interface doesn't break for most vendors, only for a few generic tablets (that get rebranded).  We notify the makers of those tablets of their driver breakage with every release (since we test their tablets along with everyone else's), and yet they rarely reply or get their code updated in a timely manner.  How they could make drivers that are specific to each version of the application is still a mystery to us.

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    _nick_caylor_Author
    Participant
    January 29, 2009
    Unfortunately, as it's a tablet PC from HP I don't really have any leverage with N-Trig. The tablet functionality cannot really be separated from the laptop. I agree that it would be helpful if N-Trig's drivers were written in a way that were recognized by photoshop. I don't know if that would be even possible given that the two technologies are inherently different. Photoshop's tablet recognition was written for Wacom, as wacom is the most popular tablet maker and the one most used for professional design. That's why I'm not surprised that photoshop doesn't recognize this entirely different driver. I just want to get it to work.
    D
    D__McCahill
    Known Participant
    January 29, 2009
    It's not the software's issue, if Wacom works and their's doesn't. Tell the company you want your money back, because their product doesn't work effectively with the number one tool for graphics production.

    (Not saying you will get the refund, but they might start paying attention to making their product work.)
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