Tablet reports

Overview

Somewhere between 100 to 250 times a second, your tablet sends a "package" of data to your computer. This package is called a "tablet report" or just "report". The tablet driver, operating, and application may modify that data. And of course a drawing application uses that data to draw a stroke.

Report rate

You can see this often in the specifications for a tablet as "report rate". Here is an example.

"RPS" means "Reports per second"

Because this is a value per second in some literature you might see the unit Hz being used. So for example instead of "200 RPS" you might see "200hz".

Report contents

The exact format of the data varies dpeending on the tablet. But conceptually the report will include data like this:

• The x,y position of the pen

• The pressure reading. 0 = no pressure or some positive integer if there is pressure

• The tilt - composed of two values: x tilt and y tilt

• The button press status

The report contains other interesting things, but these are the critical ones for drawing strokes.