On 2/6/07, Dave M G wrote:

GIMP Users,

I've been finding it difficult to draw smooth freehand curves in GIMP. I thought this might be an issue with my Wacom driver (LinuxWacom, from Sourceforge), but the members of that list are suggesting this might be a GIMP issue.

First I suggest monitoring cpu load. Especially for drawing on large images, it's good to ensure that nothing except GIMP is hogging the CPU.

I saw this bug report on line smoothing in the bug reports:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=55366

... it seems rather old, even though the latest comment is from spring of last year.

Are there any developments on this, or decent work arounds?

How do most GIMP users deal with the task of drawing smooth freehand curves?

I don't know. I do know that it is a standard practice when drawing digital art to draw the original at a multiple of the final size (eg. 4x) and this addressed most of my concerns about smooth curves even in the days when I only had a mouse.

I'm running Ubuntu Dapper, myself. And in my xorg.conf, I include the following lines in each tablet-related device definition:

Option "Threshold" "10"
Option "HistorySize" "5"

If I want super-smooth lines, I make a solid color layer, and draw on the mask instead -- then when I'm basically happy with it, I run it through PoTrace to smooth it and clean it.

Holding the pen completely upright will cut down massively on any hand-induced jitter.

Finally, the ink tool performs time-smoothing.