[PATCH 0/2] Synaptics absolute coordinate motion event support

[Peter Hutterer]

On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 04:31:11PM +0200, Takashi Iwai wrote:
> At Mon, 11 Oct 2010 13:51:35 +1000,
> Peter Hutterer wrote:
> > 
> > On Fri, Oct 08, 2010 at 03:20:40PM -0400, Joe Shaw wrote:
> > > Attached are a pair of patches which add support for absolute
> > > coordinate motion events to the synaptics driver.  The first patch
> > > allows Absolute to be passed into XSetDeviceMode() and the latter posts
> > > absolute motion events using the raw X and Y coordinates rather than
> > > computing deltas.
> > 
> > I do wonder how many users actually use their touchpad in absolute mode.
> 
> It'd be suited well for graffiti or hand-written letter recognition,
> for example.  The demand is likely a niche, though.

Note that the synaptics driver is more a set of features than an actual
hardware driver. see also
http://who-t.blogspot.com/2010/07/input-event-processing-in-x.html, second
paragraph.

If you're doing graffity on a touchpad, evdev should work just fine.
synaptics is for those that need touchpad features like two-finger
scrolling, etc.

Cheers,
  Peter