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I have a generic Drawing Tablet that I want to use with Windows 10.

When I plug the tablet to USB port, the Windows Ink icon shows up, indicating that it recognized my drawing tablet. I can draw in applications. It works perfectly fine under Windows' Paint.

However, in 3rd party application, such as Adobe Acrobat Reader, when I try to use the free form drawing. There is a delay. Initially, when I press down with the pen, a circle is shown. I got rid of it by disabling the "Click and Hold" function in Control Panel's "Pen and Touch". But the delay is still there. Here is an example of me trying to draw PacMan. The left is what I want to draw. The right is what I ended up drawing. The software did not pick up that I want to draw a line until I have started drawing.

enter image description here

You can also see in this short video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haoajtCUkFY&t=38s

The initial stroke is not shown until I drag the pen a bit ("The ink does not come out"). This makes it impossible to do any fine detail work because the application refuses to draw until I drag my pen quite a bit away.

I don't want to use the solution mentioned in the video because I don't have a Wacom tablet and I also want to be able to use any Windows machine without installing driver. Is there a workaround for using Windows Ink? (I already tried "Pen & Windows Ink" setting of "Let me use my pen as a mouse in some desktop apps" to no avail)

Giacomo1968
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some user
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2 Answers2

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A couple of workarounds I found. But by no means a solution.

1. Click-hold Draw - start drawing by dropping the pen tip down twice and hold. Basically, drawing a dot before drawing. This is rather annoying and almost always results in something extra at the starting position.

2. Draw through Remote Desktop - connect the drawing tablet to another Windows 10 device and remote desktop to the device which drawing needs to take place. For some reasons, there is no lag in recognizing the pen down event even though the remote device still recognize the input device as a pen.

some user
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Particularly for Acrobat Reader, there exist the AutoInk plug-in, described as:

AutoInk™ is a plug-in for Adobe® Acrobat® software. The plug-in provides a set of Acrobat tools (pens and highlighters) for easy annotation of PDF files using pen input. The software is capable of converting handwritten ink into text or sticky notes. Use these tools to write notes, draw, doodle, fill form fields and highlight document content.The plug-in uses smooth inking provided by Microsoft operating system and feels very easy and natural to use with a pen input. It can be also used with any other pointing device such as mouse. The Acrobat's standard "Pencil" tool is designed for a mouse input and does not utilize a pen support that comes with latest operating systems. As the result, AutoInk provides a much better user experience.

Basically, it tries to supply Reader with a modern pen interface. Their claim, which is probably correct, is that the Pencil tool of Reader is not correctly designed for a pen, but rather designed with the mouse in mind.

Extended to the other products in which the pen doesn't work as good as it could, this would put the blame on an older and lacking implementation of the pen interface. The products for which the interface works correctly are more modern products whose developers correctly understood the difference between pen and mouse and have interfaced correctly with Windows Ink.

harrymc
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