Expert: Kevin Stohlmeyer - 3/11/2010

Question
Hi Kevin

I have a problem with my pencil/brush tool in Illustrator CS4. I found a previous answer of yours to Pamela dated a few weeks ago, about the color of the layer, but that does not seem to be my problem. Like Pamela, I am getting just a blank workspace until I stop drawing, and then the curve appears. This does not happen every time, but on average during 4 out of 5 attempts. This happens with all layer colors. The other times the little dots/brush preview lines do appear just fine (on the same layer as the attempts that do not appear). With the brush it is slightly less frequent than with the pencil, but still annoyingly often. I am running it on a Fujitsu T4410 Tablet PC with 2.66 GHz Core Duo P8800), 4 GB RAM, 500 GB HDD, with Windows 7. Surely this should be sufficient to not have performance problems with just showing a simple dotted line?? The hard drive is brand-new and still has 400 GB free space, so space problems for scratch disks or such should not be a problem. I have a much older desktop PC with lower specs and Windows XP, and there the problem does not occur - does it have anything to do with Windows 7?

Sometimes the pencil just appears as the "normal" icon, and sometimes it has a tiny little x next to it in the icon. What does that x mean? At first I thought that it had something to do with whether or not the dotted line appears, but after lots more attempts I can say that the problem occurs both when the x is there and when it is not, and the lines sometimes appear even when the x is there, so it seems unrelated after all.

Thanks in advance for any ideas you might have on solving this problem!

Regards

Annelie

Answer
Hi Annelie,

It really doesn't have to do with computer performance and your issue is a little different than the other question.

What you are experiencing is a known bug with tablets and other stylus based systems. The problem is if it doesn't happen consistently its a lot harder to pin down the issue.

The pencil tool can lose its preview when people use a Wacom or other stylus tools. There is a forum about the issue here:

http://forums.adobe.com/thread/574035

A couple of people have offered solutions (for both Flash and Illustrator) but I can't test them myself.

Im also not aware of the pencil losing the "x" next to the icon, but be aware of the tools - there are two other tools similar to the pencil tool (path eraser and smoothing) that do not have an "x" next to their icons. It may be wrapped up in the same thing.

Hope this helps


Kevin