Can I use a drawing tablet as a mouse for animation software

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BitFaced
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Can I use a drawing tablet as a mouse for animation software

Post by BitFaced »

The only animation software I have access to supports cursor-controlled drawing but may not have any drawing tablet functionality, so I'm wondering if I use a drawing tablet as the mouse of the computer to get around that. Could it be a fairly cheap tablet if that was its main purpose?
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dan76
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Re: Can I use a drawing tablet as a mouse for animation soft

Post by dan76 »

I have a cheap Bamboo pen and tablet, cost £25, and that takes the place of a mouse. It has a "mouse" mode where it's not pressure sensitive. This is using an old mac running 10.6.8. So yes, it works instead of a mouse, opening folders etc. on the desktop.
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MintyTheCat
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Re: Can I use a drawing tablet as a mouse for animation soft

Post by MintyTheCat »

I have a more expensive Bamboo tablet that I use on a Mac but I have used it once under Linux and it works fine. Try to borrow one first if you do not have one but they are very useful until you have multiple screens (I have 6 on my main dev machine) then it ends up being 'up a corner' so I only use it on a single screen ancient Mac for any image work (virtually never).

The only issue is that I can only set two functions on the Stylus so when working with Photoshop or that sort of thing I still need the keyboard. I use a Tablet for drawing as I am absolutely crap at using the mouse and the Stylus is more like using a pen/pencil.
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Ji-L87
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Re: Can I use a drawing tablet as a mouse for animation soft

Post by Ji-L87 »

A tablet works great in such programs even without enabling "mouse-mode". Pressure control however will only work in programs that support it, in other applications pressing the pen against the tablet is like regular mouse-click.

The difference between tablet and mouse-mode is how it moves around on the screen.

Tablet-mode allows you to jump around to any on-screen place with the cursor like you'd do on a piece of paper but this movement is usually restricted to one screen only (depending on how you configure the tablet). So, you could jump from one corner to another directly without having to drag the mouse across the whole screen.

Mouse-mode behaves like your normal mouse and the drawing area of the tablet is no longer directly correspondent to the display area.
So you'll have to do the "drag-lift-drag" thing you do with your mouse to cover movements longer than the tablet drawing area.
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