Improving Wacom tablet brushstrokes in Linux

Getting a better brush stroke from your Wacom tablet using Linux

Summary

Use the command:

xsetwacom set "$STYLUS" PressureCurve "30 0 80 50"

to get a nicely tapered line from your Wacom Intuous stylus when using the brush tool in Inkscape.

The problem

Brush strokes from my Wacom Intuos graphics tablet just didn’t look smooth in Inkscape. I use Debian and an old school Wacom Intuos small graphics tablet to ink my cartoons digitally using Inkscape. I just couldn’t get a nice taper at the start and end of my brush stokes.

The solution

Use xsetwacom to configure the pressure sensitivity of the stylus. I’d tried and failed to set this up when I first got the Wacom tablet some years ago. I revisited this and found I wasn’t using the correct syntax. Using:

xsetwacom list

We can find the stylus for our tablet. In my case this is:

Wacom Intuos PT S 2 Pen stylus  	id: 12	type: STYLUS

We can change the brush stroke shape produced by the stylus using this command:

xsetwacom set "$STYLUS" PressureCurve "x1 y1 x2 y2"

Where x1, y1, x2, y2 define the shape of the ‘bezier curve’ produced by the stylus. Look at the man page for xsetwacom for more details. I don’t pretend to understand this either. So I played around! I found this command gave me what I was after:

xsetwacom set "$STYLUS" PressureCurve "30 0 80 50"

The default values inside the ‘"’ marks are 0 0 100 100. Please find a picture showing the curves produced by my new and improved PressureCurve values with a brush stroke produced by the default values below. I prefer the look produced by the new values.

Whatever your thoughts on my artistic assessment of brush stroke quality, with this newfound knowledge you can have endless hours of fun tweaking your own brush stroke shape.

I have a short script that I run before using Inkscape that defines the PressureCurve and the button functions for my tablet.