Hack/software to easily move screen mapping of a wacom tablet?

Question

I would like to move/manipulate the mapping of my Wacom tablet to my screen more easily than opening the preferences every time. With mapping I mean mapping the area of the tablet to a certain area of the screen. The default is of course that the tablet is mapped to the entire screen, but if you've got a big screen and want better precision you can set the tablet to only correspond to a part of your screen.

Ideally I'd like something like the functionality of Inklet, but with my "real" wacom tablet instead of a touchpad substitute: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KVFmE8la6w&feature=player_embedded

Is anyone aware of any software or hack to acheive this on Mac OS X?

If not I'm thinking about trying to write a script that centers the mapping on the current cursor position, and then bidning that to a button on my tablet. Combined with a script for toggling between fullscreen/part of screen-mapping that should be enough.

My idea so far is to edit the .prefs file since it's plain XML, and then restart the tablet driver. But any pointers relating to this would be most welcome, since my knowledge of this kind of things is rudimentary.

Answer 1

I'm having a similar problem, because I'd like to have the Display Toggle switch between two completely different tablet mappings in different orientations. However, I'm using Windows, but the solution appears to be similar.

One solution is to write a custom application using the WinTab API (Wacom's documentation). A brief scan of the reference seems to indicate that you'd have to use the Manager Handle and Manager Context functions to open and modify the default context to give the mapping you want. Once you have this program, you can set it to an expresskey with the "Open/Run..." command. I haven't tried this yet, so I can't say how it might interact with the standard Wacom Tablet Preferences manager. On the other hand, from what I can tell the preferences backup utility just copies the context information verbatim, so it may work ok.

On OSX, it would appear to involve a similar solution with the same caveats using the AppleEvents API (Wacom's documentation).

Such a program may also be able to alter the ExpressKey icons. The functions exist in the Windows API do this. Unfortunately, I'm finding the OSX documentation more difficult to parse.

Still, less work is better.

I've been looking at the preferences file as mentioned, comparing the changes (using a diff viewer) that occur depending what mapping is used. Most of the parameters seem to be directly related to ones described in the references I've linked to. On the Windows side, the file has a MappingSetArray where each element describes the screen mapping and parameters for a different transducer (a digitizing device like a pen or mouse). Each element contains an InputScreenAreaArray with 3 elements differing by AreaType and screen mappings. The remaining differences revolve around the transducer type, orientation, monitor and screen mapping. I don't fully understand the purpose of these parameters, so it will require some experimentation to figure out a configuration that works.

I'll reply again if I figure it out.