---
name: Pressure sensitivity
slug: pressure-sensitivity
category: interaction
status: published
created: 2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z
modified: 2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z
definition: Reading how hard a pen or finger presses, plus tilt and twist, so
  stroke weight and behaviour vary with the shape of the contact.
aliases:
  - name: pen pressure
    source: community
  - name: stylus tilt
    source: mdn
  - name: tilt and twist
    source: mdn
  - name: tangential pressure
    source: mdn
tags:
  - pointer
  - touch
relations:
  contrastWith:
    - force-touch
  variantOf: []
  partOf: []
  seeAlso:
    - signature-pad
implementations: []
sources:
  - title: "MDN: Pointer events (pressure, tilt, twist)"
    url: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Pointer_events
demo: inline
exhibit: false
useWhen: how hard or how tilted the input is matters
---

A contact is not a point. A pen touching a tablet reports how hard it is pressing, how far it is
leaning and in which direction, how far it has been rolled about its own axis, and, on pens with
a barrel control, how hard that is being squeezed. Pointer events carry all five as ordinary
properties on every move: `pressure` from 0 to 1, `tiltX` and `tiltY` in degrees, `twist` in
degrees of barrel rotation, and `tangentialPressure`. Nothing about them is exotic. They arrive
on the same event a mouse move does, which is exactly why they are so easy to forget about.

What an application does with them is mostly typography for the hand. Pressure drives stroke
width and opacity, so a line can start thin, swell through the middle of a gesture, and taper as
the pen lifts. Tilt turns a round nib into a chisel or spreads a shading brush. Twist rotates a
flat nib the way a calligrapher rotates a real one. Tangential pressure is the airbrush trigger.
The mapping is almost never linear: a pressure response curve is the setting artists actually
spend time on, because the interesting range of a human hand is not evenly spread across the
axis, and the same raw values feel completely different once the curve is bent.

Two neighbours are worth keeping apart. Pressure is a continuous axis, sampled on every move and
meaningful along its whole length. Force touch is a threshold laid on top of that axis: cross
one line and a discrete command fires, which makes it a button rather than a dial. Haptic
feedback is the other side of the exchange entirely, an output the device produces rather than
an input it reads, and pairing the two is what makes a threshold feel like a click.

The design consequence is blunt. Most pointers have no pressure at all. A mouse reports a
constant while it is down, plenty of touchscreens report the same, and every one of those
readers has to be able to reach the command anyway. Pressure is therefore an enrichment and
never a requirement: it may make a line prettier, and it may not be the only way to make a line
thick. It is also completely undiscoverable, since nothing on screen suggests that pressing
harder would do anything, which is why tools that take it seriously put the current value on
screen while the pen is down and let the reader see the axis they are playing.