Get bounds of PKDrawing / individual strokes in PencilKit

Question

I need access to the coordinates of individual strokes of a PKDrawing in PencilKit. Is there any way I can get access to that? Currently, my only idea is to try and decode the opaque data representation we get from PKDrawing.

Answer 1

As Ben has said, there doesn't seem to be any way to access stroke-level data in PencilKit at this time. This seems like a pretty rudimentary feature so hopefully Apple will add it next WWDC. Fingers crossed.

LetsBuildThatApp's YouTube tutorial is a good starting point if you just want basic drawing capabilities and are not too concerned about drawing quality or latency. I ran into issues when I tried to add the ability to vary the stroke width with pen pressure. I was never able to get it to transition smoothly between stroke segments of different widths - it always 'jumped' jarringly from one width to the next. Maybe there's a way to fix that, but I wasn't able to.

I suspect that currently, the only way to draw low-latency high-quality images with Apple Pencil is to write a drawing engine from scratch in Metal or OpenCL. It's strange it has taken Apple so long since the release of Apple Pencil to get a comprehensive drawing framework out. Fingers crossed that changes at WWDC 2020.

Edit: Apple announced substantial updates to PencilKit at WWDC20, including access to stroke data and functions to programatically draw strokes.

Answer 2

I was was looking for the same thing and from this comment https://stackoverflow.com/a/57565661/8891611 and my own searching of the documentation, it seems what you're asking for doesn't exist. If you do discover a way to decode the opaque data please update this thread on how so.

If you aren't necessarily set on PencilKit, you could manually code your drawing functions which is easier than it sounds. In this tutorial: https://youtu.be/E2NTCmEsdSE?t=504 I have timestamped where he shows that he has access to all the points on the lines he is creating.

And another potential solution could be to use both, by have a mapping between your PencilKit drawing and the points found from the technique in this tutorial.

Answer 3

For the strokes, you can access the property .renderBounds that gives you the dimensions of the rectangle where the stroke is into.