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From: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu (David Phillip Oster)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Graphics tablets
Message-ID: <20674@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: Tue, 15-Sep-87 16:59:30 EDT
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.20674
Posted: Tue Sep 15 16:59:30 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 17-Sep-87 06:45:31 EDT
References: <3840@ecsvax.UUCP>
Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu.UUCP (David Phillip Oster)
Organization: School of Education, UC-Berkeley
Lines: 124
Keywords: maps, scan, Superpaint

In article <3840@ecsvax.UUCP> carlos@ecsvax.UUCP (C. David Perry) writes:
>The main application will be 
>tracing maps and other artwork for manipulation with
>Superpaint or similar software. 

You probably don't want to use Superpaint, as it can only handle
documents as big as one page.  MacDraw (certainly) and MacDraft
(possibly) allow you a much larger canvas.  

Good tricks:

1.)  To increase the resolution in MacDraw is: Use the
"Reduce" menu item when you first start up, and do all your initial
data entry in reduced mode.  When you go to print, print at 50%
reduction. 

2.) Remember, if you are printing on a tractor feed printer, you can
print in "No Breaks Between Pages" and get long strips that you can
paste together like wall-paper to make murals.  I adjust my printer so
it prints just to the right selvege. I then strip off just the right
selveges, and overlap the each strip over the left selvege of the
strip next to it.  Experiment with portrait mode vs landscape mode
printing, and with selecting your entire picture and rotating it 90%
to get it to print with the fewest number of seams.

>Since we often have to work with complicated base maps,
>we think that a scanner would include too much extraneous
>information.
3.) I am familiar with 2 companies producing high resolution
digitizing tablets for Macintoshs. They are: Summagraphics, and Kurta.
I wrote a good deal of the Kurta software, so I am going to talk about
their product line:

They make a large number of different sizes of tablets, and within
many of the sizes of physical tablets you can buy different models
with differemt resolutions: 200ppi to 1000ppi.  They send data to one
of the Mac's serial ports.  You can also choose between models that
use a cordless, battery powered pen, and models that have a pen
attached by a wire to the main tablet. The cordless models require no
other power, the models with cord plug directly into the wall with a
standard power cable. (By comparison, some Summagraphics tablets have
a big power converter that plugs into the wall, that covers most of
the other outlets at that wall box.)  A digitizing puck is definately
available for the models with cord, I don't know if it is available
the cordless models.

The Macintosh software has many parts. The main one is in the form of
an 'INIT' file: you drag it into your system folder and it starts
itself. This module transforms packets coming in over the serial port
into motions of the mouse cursor. This means you can move the mouse
cursor on the screen either by moving the physical mouse, or by moving
the tablet pen near the tablet.

There is also a desk accessory for controlling the behavior of the
tablet. You use the desk accessory to tell the software:

1.) which serial port to use.

2.) to temporarily not use any port so that you can use both ports
for, say a modem session, without rebooting.

3.) which model and resolution of tablet you have

4.) (and this is the important one) to control the mapping between the
tablet's coordinate system and the coordinate system of the Macintosh.
There are a number of ways to do this:

(a) you can point. you select a rectangle on the tablet, then a
rectangle on the screen, and a rectangle on the screen, and motions
within your tablet rectangle will map to corrsponding screen motions,
just as you would expect.

(b) you can edit numbers. You get a standard dialog that gives the
coordinates of the top, left, bottom, and right of both a screen and a
tablet rectangle and you can just edit these until they are correct.

(c) you can auto-correct.  Often, you want a square on the tablet to
correspond to a square, not a rectangle on the mac.  There is a button
to push on the dialog that corrects the numbers in the dialog to
describe tablet and screen rectangles that have the same aspect ratio.

(d) you can save any mapping in a file, and load a mapping from a
library of files that you build up.  (The Kurta software uses text
files to save mappings, so they can be edited with any text editor.)

(e) you can pick a mapping to inject into the 'INIT' file so that it
will be the one that gets used when you start up.

(f) you can choose between 'tablet mode' and 'mouse mode'.  In tablet
mode, the upper left corner of your selected tablet rectangle
corresponds to the upper left corner of you selected screen rectangle.
Touch the pen to the tablet there, and the mouse cursor jumps to that
spot. It is often more convenient for a Macinotosh user to have the
stylus behave like a mouse: so a series of left strokes will move the
mouse cursor a long distance left, instead of (in tablet mode) just
covering the same screen area over and over again.

(5) you can record libraries of sequences of mouse motions and
key-strokes, and assign them to special areas of the tablet, called
"tablet buttons." Since these recordings are saved in text files also,
they can be used to get integers out of a digitizing session.

In addition, there is a programmer's interface available so that
special programs can directly read the un-transformed tablet data.

The firm 4SITE, Santa Cruz, CA.
(800) WEAVER2
(408) 475 3454
sells Kurta tablets and supports the software.

>David Perry
>carlos@ecsvax.bitnet

This is not a sufficient address for me to reply to you by mail. Nor does
the software I am using (rn) transform it into a valid reply address for me.
I apologize to anyone who thinks this posting is inappropriate for
comp.sys.mac, but it is my only way of E-mailing to David Perry.

If you are digitizing maps, you'll want the increased accuracy of the puck.

I recieve no money from the sale of Kurta tablets.
--- David Phillip Oster            --% logout
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