Elipsa pen support?

[flukejones]

Per title really. Any consideration of pen support for the Elipsa?

[baskerville]

I'm afraid you'll have to elaborate.

What would you like to be able to do with the pen?

[flukejones]

Ah sorry. I guess I mean markup text/pdf with it. Perhaps also use it with the sketch app (it does work but no palm rejection).

Probably the biggest feature would be palm rejection while using. I'm unsure how kobo does it with their own notes app

[baskerville]

@NiLuJe might have some hints about palm rejection.

[NiLuJe]

I'm not sure there's really any cute trick to it. IIRC, stuff just mostly ignores the panel events while in "pen mode".

[flukejones]

Does the input from the panel give the ability to see a touch-area size perhaps? As in maybe the kobo note app ignores all input that has a size greater than a percentage larger of the pen nib?

[NiLuJe]

I'd have to actually check, but I'm guessing it just chucks all finger touch events, period.

(I don't recall if the elan driver reports accurate tool areas on these devices).

[joaoponceleao]

Adding pen annotation support (as in allowing the user to draw freely) would be quite useful on pdf files. Less so on other formats i think. I put a request on Koreader here a while back koreader/koreader#8537 but I believe the main koreader developer is not a fan of pdfs so it is probably very low down the priority list.

There is one additional reason why it would be useful that I did not put on that request and only recently discovered: the original Kobo reader (nickel is it?) allows you to draw with the pen but not highlight or copy text. This can be overcome with with a script when importing the files back into the laptop. But what's worse, the reader does not display any annotations except its own (tested with highlights from Plato, Koreader, and multiple annotation types from Mac Preview). It basically means if you start annotating on nickel, you have to finish on nickel. No inter-operability at all....

[maks]

As a happy Plato on Aura One user and now new Elipsa owner I'd love to be able to use the pen on the Elipsa to annotate both PDFs and epubs. In some quick tests, the pens works fine for highlighting a passage in a epub.
Maybe what would be a good first step to supporting the Elipsa pen in Plato could be adding support to use the 2 push buttons on the pen, eg. the factory Kobo reader software uses the 2nd button as "eraser mode".

[NiLuJe]

One thing to keep in mind about the pen's buttons is that they don't actually generate events on their own. If the pen is near your screen but not actually generating hover events yet, you will NOT get any EV_KEY events.

Instead you'll get one press/release pair merged into a pen input frame (said frame may not be the first generated by the pen for the press event).

And the pen is hilariously verbose, so, yeah, not entirely painless to deal with.

[xeruf]

As somebody getting their first e-reader and wanting some freedom on it, is it worth paying the premium for elipsa (since I am also an avid paper note-taker, ending up with lots of chaotic paper slips) - can I use notebook features conveniently with plato, too?
Or should I get one of the cheaper devices for now, or an entirely different one?

[NiLuJe]

You'll have to use the native software for any and all pen-related note-taking stuff; there's no interop possible, as detailed above.