daledesilva
commented
3 months ago Thanks for such an in-depth review! And annoying that you lost your first one!
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Commands don't work. Thanks, I'll look into it - is this on all your devices? Or which ones and operating systems?
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Ghost points I've noticed this before but not lately. It's weird ey. I'm using an old version of tldraw so I'll try updating the module and see what happens.
2/3. Line experience is bad. This is really interesting, one of the reasons I began working on this is that I found excalidraws line experience was really bad but tldraw was much better. This was related to the exact things you describe - ie. Excalidraw's smoothing was designed for diagraming with a mouse (overly smoothed) rather than handwriting (minimally smoothed). I'm aware that there are settings in Excalidraw to adjust it, but in my experience the setting is buried and doesn't save properly, so it was unusable.
The pressure issue you described I've never seen in tldraw or ink but regularly had something similar in excalidraw (where your line starts with a big blob). So interesting that you've experienced these the exact opposite way around.
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Smoothing. In regard to the smoothing, I'm unsure how much control I have with tldraw framework, but there will always need to be a little bit of smoothing because otherwise there would be straight segments of line based on the refresh rate of the input hardware. In regard to addressing this, It's unlikely as the next big ticket item is to move off tldraw anyway. But I'll create a ticket for this to see if anyone else is experiencing it. Because I'm definitely not and I'm also hypersensitive to it.
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Draw with finger. I might address this in the future if it becomes clear that people need it for some reason, but I don't think that's the case. You can only lock out your fingers if you have a stylus, but if you have a stylus, why would you want to go back to using your finger? By removing this button, I will later be able to add further functionality to finger presses that are different to stylus gestures (selecting and moving words, etc.)
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Pressure sensitivity. This is definitely present on iPad, so it might be hardware related. Hopefully a tldraw update fixes it. Maybe also take another look, because it's also subtle, since it's not a drawing tool, but a writing tool. Writing with too much pressure is messy so it will always be designed to feel like using a ball point pen rather than a texta or paint brush. This is true even in the drawing mode, as that's still aimed at diagramming and wire framing rather than illustration.
I'm rereading your comment, I see it's all android and windows, my suspicion at the moment is that tldraw detects pen input from iOS and applies less smoothing, but maybe stylus on windows is treated like mouse input and smoothed harder (and perhaps that's true for android too). I'll have a look into it and see if I can either force or create an option.
Lastly, thanks for all your feedback so far! Do you think you can screen record a little video of using ink on your device too? It would really help.
Also, please let me know to device types, operating systems, and obsidian versions of any of the device you've seen these issues on or not (if you haven't already).
gamesinplay
I wrote a comprehensive long ass review, but my web browser unloaded the page, thanks android so here's a short version: 1: commands don't work, might be due to the force new tab option on the editor settings or the way I manage attachments (attachments folder in current subfolder not in root) since the first time the command at least created the file, so the next points are all thested in that file view and in handwriting mode, but probably translates to the other modes. 2: line experience is bad and similar to TLdraw, there's ghost points that you can't erase, and happen because the pressure required for the plugin to start drawing a line is different than the base pressure of the device (stylus pen on samsung note 20), excalidraw doesn't have this issue, might be due to what I explain on point 5.
3: there's line smoothing which distorts what you write specialy if you're a fast writer, brings delay, and isn't required when you use a stylus since it's exact to your imput unlike a finger or a non-pressure stylus, which is a plastic finger at the end. Examples on different software with and without smoothing, excalidraw has line smoothing but it's manageable.
4: when you use a stylus you enter a "pen mode" where you can't draw with finger imput (and mouse respectively on PC) unless you exit it, that's no problem and a good feature on excalidraw and TLdraw alike, but this plugin doesn't have that button, so you're stuck without being able to draw with your fingers if you want to.
5: there's no pressure sensitivity (line gets thicker if you press harder), similar to TLdraw, in the other hand Excalidraw does have pen pressure.
I hope this helps, I come from digital illustration, so some of my pet peeves aren't that important to some people, specially line smoothing, I have confident lines, so that's only a problem for stylus users, but for non-pressure users it's a must have, it would be cool that it's toggleable on and off though.
I compared the other drawing softwares/plugins available in obsidian to say that, unlike this plugin, I've tested both plugins on android pressure capable devices (samsung note 20, samsung tab s6) and on desktop (Windows) with various digital drawing tablets and pen displays, TLdraw doesn't have support for pressure in android but has on desktop iirc, although the horrible smoothing is present in both environments, different from excalidraw, where desktop have toggleable smoothing and in android the toggle doesn't work, but the smoothing is way less, so there could be a hardware limitation specific to obsidian. This probably will translate to this plugin as it behaves the same as TLdraw on my tests, which if you're using the same engine, could be TLdraw's fault, not something you can change potentially (I'm not a dev, those are only my observations as they behavethe same).
If something new comes up I'll hit a reply, I'll try to test this plugin in desktop when I have the opportunity, cheers!