Preventing unwanted horizontal scrolling with Synaptics Ultranav driver (Thinkpads and other computer using their trackpoint)

Question

Thinkpads use a combined TouchPad / TrackPoint mouse device (aka Ultranav) with a driver from Synaptics. The TouchPad is a regular laptop touchpad, but the TrackPoint, a stick and 3 buttons, which can be tracked down at IBM Research, is (arguably) more comfortable.

It works by pressure, and controls the pointer location without moving the finger. It can do both vertical and horizontal scrolling when the middle button is pressed

^{Red ThinkPad trackpoint}

While I appreciate this device, with time several applications have started to show undesirable effects related to horizontal scrolling, e.g. in Firefox some sites which detect left/right keys to "turn pages" (previous/next page) react to horizontal efforts on the TrackPoint, a very small horizontal pressure can start turning 4 or 5 pages at once. A example of such site is pydata.org, which maintains libraries documentation. This also affects pdf readers like Adobe's one. You try to scroll half a page, and because of the tiny side pressure Adobe's reader just scrolls 10 pages down.

Of course this is a big problem, it is indeed impossible to scroll vertically without creating some tiny horizontal displacements of the stick. After trying hard to find a solution, adjusting scrolling "modes", "thresholds" and so on, it seems actually impossible to prevent this using mouse parameters. It's also impossible to deactivate horizontal scrolling while keeping vertical scrolling.

So my question is how to deal with this side effect and prevent unwanted pagination resulting from horizontal scrolling?

I'm posting this question in the hope someone will be able to provide some solution of their own, but I'm also posting a solution I found, which is half satisfactory.

Answer 1

As said there is nearly no documentation from Synpatics regarding the driver and how to use it from a developer standpoint, so some developers who are not aware of how it works have started to add functions to software which react in an unwanted way to the TrackPoint.

On the other hand, with the use of virtual machines, users have difficulties to receive the non-standard horizontal scrolling events from Synaptics driver.

So there are many questions about this found online, and someone has started to mention a configuration file which can help. As there is no documentation we are moving on eggs.

There is a text file tp4table.dat located in C:\Program Files\Synaptics\SynTP for a Window computer, which looks like this:

; Windows IE8
*,*,iexplore.exe,*,*,Internet Explorer_Server,WheelStd,0,9

; Google Chrome
*,*,chrome.exe,*,*,Chrome_RenderWidgetHostHWND,WheelVkey,0,9

; Outlook Express patch for 2 button systems
*,*,msimn.exe,*,*,Internet Explorer_Server,VkKeys,0,5

; Adobe Acrobat
*,*,acrord32.exe,*,AVL_AVView,AVL_AVView,TwoParents,0,14
*,*,acrobat.exe,*,AVL_AVView,AVL_AVView,TwoParents,0,14

; PowerPoint File Open
*,*,powerpnt.exe,PP97FrameClass,Snake List,OpenListView,Standard,0,13

By commenting (with ;) the line related to the desired application, the horizontal scrolling problem seems to disappear after reboot. Horizontal scrolling is still possible, but apparently doesn't send left/right key events.

I've no clue about the reason this works.