title Ink Deformation - a review dated Q3 2025
Ink deformation
Freehand digital ink is an incredibly direct and fluid input method: It allows you to quickly jot down your ideas without any need for formalization.
One of the main benefits of using digital ink over traditional pen & paper, is the ability change the properties of ink after you’ve drawn it, rather than needing to redraw from scratch. This ability also opens the door to end-user-programmability, as we can dynamically change properties based on computations.
There’s a number of different changes you might want to make such as changing the color or position of a drawing, which we understand pretty well.
But, once you’ve drawn a stroke you might also want to change its shape. That is, to deform it. This could be relatively minor manual tweaks, such as resizing a box to make more space inside, or changing where an arrow points. It could also be more complex dynamically driven behaviour, such as a parametric sketchy CAD model, or perhaps bending a characters’ arm.
Freehand v.s Formal
Of course, if we were using a vector graphics tool, deforming shapes would be easy. Vector drawing tools provide a highly editable format that allows you to tweak positions exactly. Points, lines & bezier curves make a good match for computational dynamic behaviour, and we’ve explored end-user-programming with these primitives extensively in Crosscut.
However, for the most part, vector graphics lack the directness and fluidity of hand-drawn ink, instead requiring a lot of detailed and finicky manipulation.
We can separate representations along two axis: the first is how neat a drawing is. A back-of-the-napkind sketch is less neat than an illustration in a textbook. The second, the extent to which it is computational or dynamic. A CAD model is more dynamic than a textbook. We’re looking for a solution in the top right quandrant. Informal, but dynamic.
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