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Chad Essley’s Tip for Better Inking on a Tablet PC

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chadexmapleChad Essley is one of the best Tablet PC advocates out there and great cartoonist. He recently sent me a tip he discovered to do away with what he calls “ugly, jagged, ink” on Tablet PCs. Smooth Inking is important to artists who use Tablet PCs. Here’s what Chad had to say:

I made a recent discovery that you might want to post to GBM, that’s
been bothering me for many years. Since the birth
of the tablet pc, actually.

The Wacom penabled driver for the tablet pc, has always conflicted
with windows pen services, making for some slight incompatibility.
“Ugly, jagged ink” as stated in the GBM forums by quite a few users,
along with lag in XP.  (For which I created TabTip Tamer.)

I just discovered that this driver: PenTablet_520-7a.exe -made for the
bamboo tablets, works fantastically on the TabletPc, and Windows 7.
I got it here, at Wacom Asia:
https://www.wacom-asia.com/download/down_s.html?drv_c=162
(Actually I remember the old Cintiq 17″ tablets using a compatible pen
with the tablet pc, so I suspect any driver for the old Cintiq 17″
monitors would work.)

No more jagged lines in the tip, full pressure sensitivity and smooth
pressure in all of my drawing apps. Whew! I’ve been waiting literally
years and years for this little thing to get ironed out.

11 Comments

11 Comments

  1. smh

    10/28/2009 at 9:58 am

    What device has this been tested on?

  2. Rob

    10/28/2009 at 10:11 am

    I tried this driver on my X200T running XP SP3.
    It installed fine but it conflicts with the multi-touch driver, causing it to crash on startup. I tried uninstalling the multi-touch driver and reinstalling the latest version from Lenovo, but the same issue occurs. I wish these drivers would play nicely with one another.

  3. Tim

    10/28/2009 at 11:03 am

    Anyone tested this out on Win7? Or is it even necessary on Win7? I haven’t seen ink enough to know whether mine is jagged or not.

  4. bahz

    10/28/2009 at 11:32 am

    I actually tried using this driver for my tx2000 under both vista and win 7 about a week ago. It works great with the pen, but it seems to completely disable the touch driver, meaning pen yes, finger no.

    Anyone else have similar issues?

    In fact, the driver that works best for me is the old 5.05-7 that HP shipped with the laptop since it will allow you to touch at the very edges of the screen.

  5. Jack

    10/28/2009 at 11:50 am

    I installed this, stupidly, on my HP TC1100 and now neither the digitizer nor the pen work. What do I do?

  6. Frank

    10/28/2009 at 11:52 am

    The issue is old, the same with the solution, the Press-and-hold-to-right-click feature must be disabled and everything works fine in XP. No need for any new driver.

  7. Jack

    10/28/2009 at 12:01 pm

    How do I do that?

  8. John in Norway

    10/29/2009 at 2:42 am

    Tried it on my Kojinsha SC3 (being a touchscreen it has atrocious inking) and don’t see any difference. Everything works as before, though, so hopefuly there’s no harm done.

  9. Jack

    10/29/2009 at 6:18 am

    I uninstalled it, deleted a few HIDs in Device Manager, reinstalled the HP Wacom driver, rebooted, and it self-healed. Thank God.

  10. Chad Essley

    10/29/2009 at 1:32 pm

    Tested on my Motion Computing Le1700, as well as a Sahara I440D both running Windows 7 X64. This would only work with Wacom based digitizers, and not the new multitouch dual stylus / touch panels that ship with say the new Lenovo.

    For those with Wacom dual touchscreens of course, this would remove the touch portion of your experience. Sorry for any intercommunication. Why Wacom and Microsoft can’t get together on this.. I really can’t understand it, after all these years. Looks like I’ve found a solution though, using this Bamboo driver.

    Good luck to all, and my desk is always open to those with tablet pc software / hardware related questions. Contact via my website.

    Best,
    C

  11. Chad Essley

    10/29/2009 at 1:34 pm

    Er.. that’s sorry for any “miscommunication” in my last post.. :) ha
    C

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