Wintab dll: Status report.

[Aric Stewart]

Interesting. Since I had myself as well as at lest 3 other organizations 
of testers testing this code at each step with Photoshop6 and 7 and 
Painter 7 as well as a number of test applications. None of us saw these 
problems.

> 
> What I found, and could fix:
> 
>     Sometimes a badly configured tablet can generate
>     X errors on the XOpenDevice method.
>     Fixed by ensuring tablet driver was functional.
>     I don't know if the errors need to be caught, or
>     not, but I think they were causing crashes.
>     This is probably related to synchonous/asynchonous
>     X modes.

Was XOpenDevice returning a device but also creating errors? That seems 
really counter intuitive since it is only suppose to return the device 
if it succeeds. However I am not much of a x11 programmer.

When this error occurred where was the crash? probably at some point 
where I am gathering the tablet information. It would be good to find 
that line and fix it there also.

> 
>     In Photoshop, an infinite loop in method FindOpenContext
>     when attepting to traverse the wintab context chain.
> 

Something is going seriously wrong here if there is an infinite loop. 
The contexts should be a linked list so someone's next is pointing to 
something previous in the list. WHen i did photoshop it created only 2 
contexts (and only did anything with 1 of them) both where contexts to 
the root window.

Where is this loop being created?

>     In Painter, a number of methods didn't handle NULL prameters
>     properly, resulting in various crashes.
>     Wintab uses NULL paramters to signify a query for size of
>     available data, or to signify a request to flush the Wintab
>     packet queue.
> 

Which methods? I thought that i had handled all the cases i had seen 
used this way.

> Aric, I'm wondering if I should really be fixing these things, as
> these look like the kind of bugs Code Weavers will have fixed in the
>  normal course of product support.
> 

Like I said, We saw none of these problems. It was working wonderfully 
for me, and all our tester and customers. So if you need to fix things 
for your tablet then you should fix them because I cannot reproduce it 
here at all.

> 
> After fixing these issues, The following remain:
> 
>     1. Photoshop doesn't seem to respond to pressure.
>     2. Painter receives wintab events, but coordinates
>         are extreme: only see lines from one side of
>         drawing to another.
>     3. Maybe some further research into the errors from XOpenDevice.
>         I'm not convinced it is a problem.
> 

The first thing you need to do is make sure that your tablet is working 
under X. There is a great little program called xinput, it is a utility 
that test the XInput module. You can see all the axis of your device and 
make sure they are working. I found that to get XInput to recognize 
pressure from my wacom tablet i needed to run the latest wacom drivers 
from http://linuxwacom.sourceforge.net/index.php/main.

you can download xinput from 
ftp://ftp.x.org/contrib/utilities/xinput-1.2.tar.gz


> Aric, are these the kind of bugs you were seeing with Painter?
> 

no actually, the problem I was seeing was a race condition inside 
painter with the button/pressure testing code. Such that after you 
lifted the stylus painter would still think that the stylus was in 
contact with the pad and keep drawing.

> I'm suspicious of the Wintab packet building code, as it has to
> build a C data struct on the fly. Looking at the code though, I can't
> see anything that could be going wrong.
> It could also be a scaling issue, where the scales deduced from X
> are wrong (I remember being suspicious of some of the values returned
> by the wacom driver).
> 

This i tested alot with my own test programs and it seemed to be working 
quite well.

> I think in the light of the crashing bugs, Aric's patch shouldn't
> go in as-is.
> 
> If people want, I could post up a patch with the fixes I've added so
> far.
>

I would like to see more details about where you are having these 
problems and how you fix them as I may be able to continue to help out.

thanks
-aric