Monday, April 1, 2019

Windows Ink screws up Wacom tablets?

I just bought and installed a Wacom Intuos Pro (medium) to see what kind of experience drawing with a pen on a computer provides.

Installation was simple enough, but as soon as I had everything working, I quickly realized I couldn't click and drag with the pen -- at all. I couldn't drag windows around, I couldn't drag inside a webpage. Instead everytime I tried to drag, it was performing a grab / scroll operation.

It took me thirty minutes of digging to figure out that this was a "Windows Ink" feature / bug. I spent some time unsuccessfully trying to completely turn off Windows Ink, but the tutorials that told me to use the registry or mess with group policy settings just didn't work.

Finally I found a youtube video explaining the problem, and directing me to the hidden spot in the Wacom control panel where you can turn off Windows Ink.

Here it is for my Intuos Pro... However, if you want to use Photoshop, or other apps that rely on Windows Ink for pen pressure, you'll need to watch the video and learn how to tell photoshop to fallback to the legacy pen-pressure APIs.


Why would Windows ship a pen Ink feature which screws up Wacom, the longest running and leading manufacture of pen input devices?

Why would Wacom hide this setting to turn off Windows Ink deep in the bowels of their control panel? Especially when it's now essential to making Wacom tablets function at all.

Mysteries.