Hi! I recently purchased a Wacom tablet and have been trying to use it not only for painting/coloring, but sketching/lineart. After some getting used to it control is not that much less than working on paper. But I soon noticed problems with long curves especialy in vertical direction. Working analogue I just turn the paper (or alter my own position acordingly). Something similar should be possible in the digital world ... Now Painter supports rotating the view without affecting the image, and so should the GIMP. There's a bug report here: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=55367 Like stated there I'm willing to provide mockups, but after looking at Painter Classic there is not much to mockup. There should be a tool in toolbox for rotating the view. The icon would be an open circle with arrowheads (I offer to provide that ... are there any guidelines or notes how the existing icons came to be?). I think it should be a seperate tool from the existing rotate one, because it isn't destructive/undoable. Rotation would happen by just click-dragging anywhere in the canvas area. It could be nice to indicate the rotation center, but it's not needed. Resetting to 0 should be possible by clicking on the empty canvas area. A doubleclick might also do the trick. Of course for a fluid workflow there would have to be something faster than actualy switching tools. It's just great to have panning on middle 'mouse' button (one of the details where GIMP has an advantage over PS). Would it be possible to trigger rotation on left-drag, when middle button is held down? Else it could work with middle button and Ctrl. View rotation could also be triggered by right-drag on the panning tool in the scrollbar corner. Could also have it's own place instead of the 'Set canvas padding color' thing. However, in the popup window a line would be drawn from the initial pointer location to the actual one to indicate center of rotation and pointer location. Ok, something to mockup, but not before I hear something positive ... And now for something else: Because tablet and monitor aspect ratio don't match, and distortion free mapping is needed for serious graphical work, there's always some unused tablet area. Now there are those special fields (new/1, open/2, ...) on larger wacoms and special support from the Windows driver. But having to look at the tablet is stupid anyway. How about mapping the unused area to a special window, that will appear on the screen edge, when the pen is in that area? This window could be filled with editable commands and settings. I bring this up here, because GIMP is the only app with special tablet support on Linux (I know of), and the one where I would expect the largest benefit from such functionality. --- Thorsten Wilms
