Using a Wacom or other graphics tablet on a Mac for presenting

A graphics tablet is the difference between drawing on screen and writing on screen. With a mouse you can circle, box and point perfectly well. The moment you want to write a word, a number or a quick diagram, a mouse turns it into a scrawl. A pen puts your normal handwriting on the display.

Here’s how to get a tablet working well on a Mac for presenting, teaching and calls, and how LivePen handles it.

Why pressure matters

Pressure is what makes pen strokes look like writing. When you press harder the line gets wider, and as you lift off it tapers. That variation isn’t decoration. It carries the shape of the letters: the downstrokes are heavier, the joins are lighter, and the ends of strokes are clearly ends.

Without pressure, every line is the same width. Letters blur into each other at small sizes, and after video compression on a call a uniform line is harder to make out than one with some contrast in it.

LivePen’s pen is built on a variable-width ink model. With a tablet it uses the real pressure your pen reports. With a mouse or trackpad it simulates pressure from how fast you move, so fast strokes thin out and slow ones fill in, which is a reasonable stand-in but not the same as a pen.

The highlighter is deliberately flat-width in either case, since a highlight should look even.

How LivePen knows you’re using a pen

A tablet pen should report itself to the system as a pen, along with a pressure value. On a Wacom Intuos Pro under macOS, that’s what happens: LivePen sees a pen with pressure across its full range, and uses real pressure from the first stroke.

That label can’t always be trusted. macOS has a history of reporting some tablets as a plain mouse, which would throw the pressure data away if an app believed it. So LivePen doesn’t rely on the label alone:

• If the device says it’s a pen, it’s believed straight away.
• If it doesn’t, LivePen watches the pressure during each stroke. As soon as the pressure actually varies, it switches to real pressure and stays there.
• A mouse reports a flat, unchanging value, never trips that check, and keeps the simulated pressure.

In practice that means you plug in the tablet and draw. There’s no setting to find.

The pen’s buttons, out of the box

Most tablet pens have two buttons on the barrel, and some have an eraser end. Out of the box on a Wacom pen, the barrel buttons act as mouse buttons, and LivePen handles those directly:

Pen button	What it does in LivePen
Tip	Draws
Right click	Undoes the last stroke
Erase	Switches to the eraser while you hold it, then back to your tool

The erase button is momentary on purpose, because that’s how a pen’s eraser is meant to work: hold it, touch the stroke, let go. If the pen leaves the tablet mid-erase, your previous tool comes back, so it can’t get stuck.

Only the tip draws. Pressing a barrel button won’t leave a stray mark.

Mapping keystrokes to the buttons

Tablet drivers let you set each pen button to send a keystroke instead of a click. The driver doesn’t tell apps what a button is set to, so LivePen can’t read your driver settings. What it can do is listen for whatever keystroke the button sends.

• Undo and Redo: if you set a button to the driver’s Undo or Redo function, it sends ⌘Z or ⇧⌘Z, which are LivePen’s defaults while drawing. They work with no setup.
• Anything else: set the button to send a keystroke in the driver, then open LivePen’s Preferences, click Record next to the action you want, and press the pen button. LivePen captures whatever the driver sends, so the button and the shortcut match exactly.

A useful one to map is start and stop drawing, which is ⌥⇧D by default. Put it on a pen button and you can switch between drawing and clicking without touching the keyboard.

Two things to know about the shortcuts. ⌘Z and ⇧⌘Z only belong to LivePen while you’re drawing; stop, and they go straight back to your other apps. And some other software that watches ⌘ shortcuts globally may still react to them. If that’s a problem, record undo as something like ⌥⇧Z instead.

Drawing on a tablet while looking at the screen

If your tablet has no screen of its own, you draw on the pad and watch the monitor. It feels odd for about ten minutes. These help:

• Map the tablet to one display. In the driver settings, map the pad to the screen you present on, not across all of them. LivePen draws on your primary display, so map the tablet to that one.
• Keep the proportions. If the driver offers a “force proportions” option, use it. Otherwise circles come out as ovals because the pad and screen are different shapes.
• Square the tablet to the monitor. A tablet sitting at an angle makes every line slope.
• Write larger than you would on paper. Aim for letters a few centimetres tall on the pad. Small writing magnified onto a big screen shows every tremor.
• Hover to aim. A tablet pen reports its position before it touches, so hover to line up with what you’re pointing at, then touch down.
• Anchor your hand. Rest the side of your palm on the tablet. Drawing with your hand floating makes lines shaky.
• Practise shapes first. A few circles, arrows and ticks before a session loosen you up.

If you have a pen display, where you draw directly on a screen, most of this doesn’t apply. Just check that the display you draw on is the one you share.

Weights and colours for pen work

For writing, the thinner weights look most like handwriting. For pointing and circling on a call, go thicker so the marks survive compression. [ and ] step through LivePen’s four weights while you draw, so you can switch between writing and pointing without going to the toolbar.

Known limits

Tilt is reported by pens like the Wacom Pro Pen 3, but LivePen doesn’t use it yet, so there’s no calligraphic angle effect. Barrel rotation isn’t reported by that pen at all.

Trying it

If you have a tablet in a drawer, LivePen is a good reason to get it out. The 14-day free trial needs no account or card. The presentations page shows how it fits into a talk, and the docs cover tablet setup and every shortcut.