WinTab vs Windows 10 Ink

Back in the early years 2000 and way before the Ipad Pro, Microsoft used to dominate the portable digital drawing solutions market with its Windows XP TabletPC edition and the Tablet PCs.

Some of the most popular Tablet PCs were the Toshiba M200 or the HP TC4200 then TC4400.

When they came out around 2004 those laptops with a pivoting display and wacom digitizer were ultra expensive and primarly aimed at business nomad people.

Few years later, it was possible to grab those corporate computers in central London at the week-end's Computer Fairs for less than the cost of a Wacom Intuos. Few people understood the slightly higher price tag for a second hand laptop so my friends and I were able to grab several models for a fraction of the cost of a Cintiq and enjoy drawing in Autodesk Sketchbook Pro or animate in TV Paint on-the-go.

Those computers included a Wacom digitizer so regular Wacom drivers installed WinTab if I remember correctly. Forgive my memory, we are talking about 2006/2007 here!! So Wintab was the historical driver implementation of pen pressure on Windows operating systems.

Since Windows 8 and Windows 10, there is a plethora of digitizer technologies, N-Trig being the one favoured by Microsoft on the Surface, so Windows Ink is gradually replacing WinTab as a way of unifying the various technologies.

Unfortunately, this leads to a lot of confusion at the moment with software makers battling on the Ink and Wintab fronts so it is not rare to find pro softwares behaving differently depending if you use Ink or Wintab and some simply don't work or won't support pen pressure if you use the wrong mode.

TV Paint uses both technologies but the hotkeys seem to behave different depending which one you use.

In Photoshop, to enable the pressure sensitivity when using Ink, you need to tick the Pressure Sensitivity button that appeared in the top toolbar in the recent Photoshop versions.

If you are using a Wacom tablet and are unsure if Ink is enabled or not, just go to the Mapping section of the Wacom control panel. It would have made more sense to me if they placed it in the Pen tab instead but well, this is where Wacom decided it should be.

Going back to Photoshop, I am still totally unsure which technology is better. Currently I feel that my lines are cleaner and smoother without Ink and most people tend to hold the same opinion.

Warning, there seems to be an additional trick to make the Pressure sensitivity recognized in Photoshop with Ink disabled, by creating a PSUserConfig.txt file containing the command "UseSystemStylus 0" in your Photoshop CC Settings folder. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMinyqZpVko



Funny enough, I don't remember using that trick and today, I realised that file was there!

I hope this post gave you a better understanding about Ink and Wintab, I am preparing a tutorial on the awesome Clip Studio Paint so stay tuned.