Drawing with pencil quality

[hbouzagl]

Hi,
Is there any way to dactivate the antialiasing in the freehand pencil annotation?
When you write something with the pencil, the viewer change the drawing to smoother draw but I want to remove this functionality and let exactly the draw done with the pencil without any enhancement.

Henri

[Stefan - PDF-XChange]

Hello Henri,

I am afraid that in the current version of our Viewer you can not turn of the simplification.
Of course the "smoothing" or anti-aliasing can be switched off from Edit -> Preferences -> Rendering -> Smooth Line art - but this will not change that the number of curves sed to describe your line at the moment is reducing the details.

Please have a look at this topic where we have discussed the same in some detail:
https://forum.pdf-xchange.com/ ... =35&t=7971

Best,
Stefan

[Vasyl - PDF-XChange]

Hi, Henri.

Is there any way to deactivate the antialiasing in the freehand pencil annotation?

Feature for removing/customizing smoothing for pencil will be available in the next build, wait some weeks.

Best
Regards.

[hbouzagl]

Hi Vasyl
Glad to ear that you are working on this issue.
Is it possible to be betatester of the version 3?

Thanks a lot to a very dynamic and responsive team !
Henri

[Stefan - PDF-XChange]

Hello Henri,

The next build would be ver 2.5, and there is not yet a beta version of ver3 at this time.

Best,
Stefan

[hbouzagl]

Hi Stefan,
do you have a date of availability for the build 2.5? or a beta version ?
Henri

[Stefan - PDF-XChange]

Hello Henry,

No beta version for this build either but the release is planned to happen in the next couple of weeks if all goes well.

Best,
Stefan

[adammaths]

Feature for removing/customizing smoothing for pencil will be available in the next build, wait some weeks.

Is this done in the new build because I just installed the new version and I can't find where to customize...

I'm using this viewer on an interactive white board (like a writing tablet but the size of a white board) so my hand writing is small compared to the size of the page. The smoothing/vectorizing is not enough precise. The algorithm is good when I draw big shapes but not small letter.

I still think this is a great program for what I need. I just want that my students stop complaining about the poor quality of my handwriting, which is partly due to the smoothing of the tool...

thanks
Adam

[Stefan - PDF-XChange]

Hello Adam,

I just spoke with Vasyl, and it turns out that we can not turn off the smoothing for the default pen tool - The Adobe PDF Standard doesn't support this.

In PDF-X Viewer 2011 however we are planning to implement our own pen tool which will be more usable and customizable.
We will also try to make some improvements to the standard pen tool if it is at all possible to make them and keep following the specification.

Best,
Stefan

[adammaths]

Hi thanks for this fast reply
Without removing the smoothing, maybe it could be possible to augment the number of points that are stored so the curve is more precise. The problem in fact is for square corners that are always rounded by the algorithm. Maybe there is something to do with that. Find a way to detect corners and force an end point of the Bezier curve (not a control point).
Maybe it's possible, maybe not...
Adam

[Stefan - PDF-XChange]

Hello Adam,

Thank you for the understanding, and I will leave it now with the dev team.
As for "corner detection" - I do no think this is as easy as it sounds - but let's see what the guys will come up with.

Regards,
Stefan

[adammaths]

Hi
I'm wondering how this feature is evolving. Do you have an estimate date for the next version of the viewer.
Right now the pen tool is just useless with the interractive white board. My students and I are really laughing at the vectorizing algorithm as my handwriting turns to something that simply doesn't look like any know character.
The software "Pdf Annotator" has a pen tool that doesn't seem to do vectorizing...
Thanks again for looking at this
Adam

[Stefan - PDF-XChange]

Hello Adam,

We are working really hard on ver3 of the Viewer, and hope to have it ready a bit later this autumn, but are not yet ready to commit to any release date.

We have noted your comments on the pencil tool, and are definitely going to make improvements. We already have several tickets in our internal system on the subject and one of them is an exact match:
#399: Feature Request : disable smoothing of the pen

So this is definitely going to be considered and in ver3 there should be an option that will allow you to turn the smoothing off, and/or finely tune it.

Best,
Stefan