Wintab32 dll devlopment

[Robert North]

Aric Stewart aric-at-codeweavers.com |Wine Mailing Lists| wrote:
> Hi Robert,
> 
>  I did a Wintab32 implementation for CrossOver Office 2.0. I will create 
> a patch for winehq and submit it later today. If you want to continue to 
> work off of that you are welcome to.  It may be best not to duplicate 
> work too much.


It's great to hear somebody's been working on this problem.
*but*
It's a shame You didn't tell me that you were working on this.
I explicitly contacted people on this list, and opened a Wine bug
to avoid this kind of problem.
We could have collaborated on the design & implementation...
Or alternatively I could have got on with something else.
I have a number of much more important things to work on.

I find it highly demotivating to see my effort duplicated by other 
developers. I think it's in Wine's and Codewavers best interest to keep
everybody as motivated as possible.

*What to do now?*
The best thing to do now is keep in close contact and work out where
to go from here.


I think first I need to do is to re-iterate my main interest in getting
tablet input working:

1. To get Metacreations (Now Procreate) Painter 5.5 working with tablet.
	This requires:
		Pressure axis
		Tilt axes
		Eraser.

2. To to get Photoshop working with tablet (which I assume is done).
	I think this only requires the following:
		Pressure axis.
		Eraser.
	(I'll have to look at my notes).


If both 1. & 2. are done, then I'm satisfied, and will probably consider 
the project complete.

> 
> 
>>
>> 1. Cross over office and tablets.
>> I heard somewhere that Crossover office had a tablet implementation.
>> Does anyone know about this, and who to contact to find out more?
>> If they've got an implementation of wintab, I wonder if it's worth 
>> continuing the development.
> 
> 
> I would say yes, My development was specifically for the wacom intuos 
> tablet. I tried hard to make it general enough to incorporate anything 
> using wintab32.dll but if you have other devices that would be great.

I  have an intuos2, so can't really add anything here.


> 
>>
>> 4. Config files
>> Wintab will need some config data.
>> I assume the best place to put this is in the ~/.wine/config file,
>> within a registry key named "wintab"?
> 
> 
> I worked hard to require no config data.

Yes, I came to the conclusion that you can get away without much config
data, and defaults can work quite nicely.
But you do need some to support more advanced features.

If you're only dealing with intuos cursors, then you can make many 
assumptions that minimise config.
But you need to be able to identify at least the X11 cursor for the 
intuos pen eraser, and the cursor for the pen stylus.
It may also be necessary to specify parameters for the transform from
X tilt & Y tilt to the wintab polar tilt coordinates.


Have you managed to work around these issues?


> 
> 
>>
>> 7. Cross-platform abilities
>> Is there any need to think about allowing alternatives to
>> XInput to plug into the wintab dll?
>>
> 
> because i wrote to the X level, and tablets all seemed to use the XInput 
> functions i wrote to XInput. To write directly to the hardware devices 
> seemed to be way to device specific to me, as well as duplicating the 
> work done on the wacom X driver.

I had 2 issues in the back of my mind here.
1. I've heard some kind of rumors of wine on OS/2, and other OS.
	These may not use the x11drv dll.
2. I was a little suspicious that there may be performance problems 
going through wine,x11,and the drvice drivers. If this was the case I
wanted an easy fallback to  the device driver level. This is obviously 
unfounded.

I did some limited work towards driver independance, but have curtailed
it to a few architectural choices, and some principles to bear in mind, 
if it's ever needed.

> 
> I will try to have my patch submitted later today.
> 

About to examine it now
	-Rob.