This page contains the revision history and known bugs and fixes for the Virtual Tablet Interface by version and component. Fixes or workarounds are included with each problem unless otherwise noted. If you are experiencing problems with the Virtual Tablet Interface drivers, utilities or applications and don't find the answer here, please contact us via email at support@vtablet.com or by voice at 425-868-3246 during technical support hours if you are a registered user.

Version 6    Version 5    Version 3    Version 2    Version 1

VERSION 4.13

(September 23, 1998)

General

All components of the Virtual Tablet Interface have been tested and certified as Year 2000 compliant including all previous versions.

Drivers

Clipping functionality from within the Manager and templates is now much more intelligent providing out-of-bounds tracking while a button is pressed.

Template display regions now work fully with cropping features in the Manager.

Support has been added for the Summagraphics Summagrid V series digitizers.

Wintab Compatibility

Button 2 functionality has been restored for certain applications like CorelDraw.

AutoCAD R14 calibration requirements are now documented in both the Users’ Guide and the Tablet Manager’s online help.

Editor

Region rounding is now accurate to within .05 inches (from .1 inches) though this feature can still be disabled from the General Tab of the Options dialog.

Setup

Setup now installs the digitizer configuration and information file titled DIGITIZE.TXT to the Virtual Tablet directory and creates a program item for it.

 VERSION 4.12

(June 20, 1998)

Drivers

Support for ALTEK AC/Datatab 3036 and 4460 series has been added.

GTCO Ultima 1212 digitizers now work correctly.

Configuration information is now provided for Summagraphics Microgrid and Summagrid digitizers when used with a stylus. See Note 17 in DIGITIZE.TXT for details.

Wintab Compatibility

Protection faults with Corel PhotoPaint 8 have been resolved.

Compatibility problems with Adobe Photoshop 4 have been resolved.

Coordinate rounding has been improved to within one-half significant digit.

VERSION 4.11

(March 2, 1998)

Drivers

Event logging strings under Windows NT are now accessible to the Event Log.

Buttons for the Numonics GraphicMaster with four button cursors have been fixed.

Support for multiple AutoCAD sessions has been improved.

Wintab Compatibility

Positioning is now ignored unless locked in the Default Tablet and defaults to absolute positioning.

Manager

Upper level tabs are now accessible from the keyboard using accelerator keys.

Editor

The compiler now detects and tries to automatically correct regions overlapping by up to .05 inches.

Setup

Setup can now install the Virtual Tablet Interface to hard drives other than the same as Windows NT is located.

VERSION 4.10

(September 5, 1997)

Drivers

Absolute and relative positioning may now be toggled by a digitizer button. Clicking the specified button toggles between absolute and relative positioning starting with the current setting.

Support for LASICO 128XX arm and area/line digitizers has been added.

The template-input buffer has been increased from 256 to 512 Virtual Tablet Key codes.

Support for international keyboards has been vastly improved and now correctly plays back all Virtual Tablet Key codes regardless of the keyboard layout or language.

Support for extended ANSI characters has been added, e.g. international characters.

Wintab Compatibility

Support for the Out of Bounds tracking extension has been added for the (admittedly few) applications that can take advantage of, or require, this feature. By default, Out of Bounds Tracking is disabled and requires specific enabling by the calling application.

Button assignments for ESRI’s ArcView have been changed to match those listed in the user’s guide and tutorials. For more information, see the file README.TXT for details.

Clipping is now ignored unless locked in the Default Tablet.

Manager

The Positioning section of the Pointer Tab has been updated to allow you to specify a toggle button between absolute and relative positioning. See Drivers for details.

The Manager now defaults to loading invisibly on the Windows desktop. To show the Manager on Windows startup, uncheck the option “Hide Manager on Startup” on the Manager Tab.

Clicking the exit button (or choosing Exit from the system menu) now hides the Manager instead of truly exiting the program. To completely unload the Manager, hold the shift key while clicking the exit button (or choosing Exit from the system menu).

By default, the Manager displays icons for itself and active templates in the notification area of the Explorer taskbar. Each time you switch tasks on the desktop, a small icon will appear depending on whether a template is executing for that task. Left clicking on this icon will activate the Manager (or show the Manager if hidden). Right-clicking a template icon will run the Virtual Tablet Editor to edit the template source file.

General Protection Faults with certain 32-bit applications (notably ArcView) running on Win32s and Windows 3.1.

Editor

Combinations can now be inflated or deflated individually via a new command on Format Menu. By default, the Editor inflates new combinations in order to provide a more pleasing border. To disable this feature, uncheck the item “Inflate Combinations” in the General Tab of the Options dialog. To change the inflation for an existing combination, select the combination(s) and choose Inflate from the Format Menu.

Object shadowing can now be more closely controlled with the addition of an “Auto Scale Shadows” item to the General Tab of the Options dialog. By default, the Editor scales shadow sizes to maintain symmetry with the underlying object’s size. However, this can result in uneven shadow sizes across multiple objects within a template. To disable this feature and use constant size object shadowing, uncheck this new item.

The minimum grid size has been reduced from 0.10” to 0.05” facilitating higher precision in placing regions.

Region selection handles are now displayed while formatting their properties in order to aid in identifying those regions, which will be changed.

The default template directories are now {VTABLET}\Editor\TEMPLATE.

The default style directories are now {VTABLET}\Editor\STYLES.

A new backup option has been added allowing you to automatically save templates without prompting.

The compiler now detects and moves overlapping regions in order to identify and/or delete the duplicated region previously inaccessible without deleting both regions.

VERSION 4.02

(April 5, 1997)

Drivers

Support for Summagraphics BitPad Two digitizers has been added.

Support for Houston Instruments True Grid digitizers has been added.

You can now disable mouse support in full screen DOS windows (Win9X only). See the file README.TXT for details.

You can now override normal task activation on startup. See the file README.TXT for details.

Wintab Compatibility

Compatibility with ArcView. See the file README.TXT for details.

Setup

Windows NT 3.51 now correctly loads the Manager under all user profiles.

VERSION 4.01

(February 24, 1997)

Drivers

Enabling Vanishing with the Windows cursor outside the tablet task now correctly shows the cursor when moved back into the task’s primary window (Win32 only).

Invalid serial port parameters no longer hang the Windows NT system driver.

High speed polling applications (e.g. MapInfo) under Window NT.

Support for GTCO Ultima II Series digitizers has been added.

Wintab Compatibility

Button two double-bounces and occasional hangs requiring application restarts in AutoCAD (depended on the [BUTTONS] and [AUX] definitions in ACAD.MNU file).

Compatibility with ESRI’s Arc View button double-click requirements.

System hangs with Wintab-compatible applications that do not properly define button events.

Manager

The Manager now automatically temporarily removes the “Keep Manager Window on Top” option when minimized to an icon or on the task bar.

VERSION 4.00

(January 25, 1997)

General

In addition to many new and improved features, this release of the Virtual Tablet Interface supports Windows NT versions 3.51 and higher (including NT 4.00) in addition to Windows 3.1 and Windows 9X.

Drivers

Button macro support has been added. This feature allows you to assign keyboard macro strings using Virtual Tablet Key Codes to any digitizer button.

Cursor vanishing support has been added. This feature hides the Windows cursor when typing and then shows the cursor again when the mouse is moved.

Cursor wrapping support has been added. This feature wraps the Windows cursor when moved past the edges of the display. Enabled in relative mouse mode only.

Device contention support has been added. This feature temporarily disables the digitizer while another pointing device is being used until any digitizer button is pressed and released.

Pressure smoothing has been added. This feature averages pressure over a series of readings in order to reduce jitter from pressure styli.

Device reset support has been added. This feature resets and initializes the digitizer which is useful if turned on after Windows has started or when diagnosing problems.

Support for Kurta Series Three and Hitachi Series B digitizers has been added.

Button masking has been extended from four to sixteen buttons with full range of motion including double-clicks.

Air brushing has been extended from four to sixteen buttons.

The default button mapping is no longer a left double-click on button four. To restore this user preference, use the Masking field in the Buttons Tab of the Manager.

Rotation is now applied earlier in packet processing and affects template picks, clipping and cropping. Also, Virtual Tablet and Wintab-compatible applications will also be affected.

Button assignments for Summagraphics SummaSketch (16-button), Microgrid and Summagrid digitizers have been restored to their factory defaults. Use the Tablet Manager’s Buttons Tab (Masking) to modify buttons to other than their default assignments.

Hitachi Series B, C, D, and E have been changed. Please reconfigure for 8/1/N serial interface and the Hitachi standard (6-byte) output format.

Typical supported hardware resolutions have been increased from 500 to 1000 lines per inch. Some older digitizers may require reconfiguration via dip-switches.

Disabling the driver via the Tablet Manager’s Driver Tab under Windows 9X now completely removes the driver from the com port interrupt allowing another application (including full screen DOS) to share the port without interference.

Wintab Compatibility

General protection faults (Win9X only) from certain 32-bit applications including CorelDraw and Visual CADD.

AutoCAD button menus are now accessible from within the screen pointing area.

Manager

The Manager’s tabs have been reorganized with the addition of a Cursor and Locking tab. The Cursor Tab contains relative mouse mode features including Sensitivity, Acceleration and Wrapping (new). The Pointer Tab now contains mode-independent features including Orientation, Positioning and Vanishing (new). The Locking Tab allows you to lock features from further changes by either the Manager or other applications.

Button macros have been added to the Template Tab. See Drivers for details.

Task descriptions can now be edited (including the Default Tablet) by selecting the tablet task and right-clicking or pressing the Insert key.

Cursor vanishing has been added to the Pointer Tab. See Drivers for details.

Cursor wrapping has been added to the Cursor Tab. See Drivers for details.

Device reset has been added to the Device Tab. See Drivers for details.

Device contention has been added to the Drivers Tab. See Drivers for details.

Pressure smoothing has been added to the Pressure Tab. See Drivers for details.

A default option has been added to the Manager Tab for confirmations when destroying task tablets.

Clear buttons have been added to Clipping and Cropping areas of the Coordinates Tab allowing you to reset the clipping and cropping areas to their full sizes, respectively.

The Status Tab now provides an option in the Device area for viewing button, pressure and coordinate data after processing by the driver. To use, uncheck Raw Device Data.

The default button mapping is no longer a left double-click on button four. To restore this user preference, use the Masking field in the Buttons Tab setting both button four up and down digitizer events to a Windows left-click action.

Editor

The Template Wizard has been enhanced to support exploding sub-menus which is now the default. This feature builds separate combinations for each sub-menu processed instead of nesting the sub-menu within the area previously reserved in it’s parent menu.

The template Wizard has been enhanced with user-selectable menu levels between 1-This allows you to specify how deep in a nested menu application the wizard will descend looking for cascading menus to process.

A Recombine command has been added to the Format menu and Toolbar which, when selected, combines selected regions using the last combination style prior to breaking. This feature makes it easy to break, edit and recombine regions without having to reformat the combination style each time.

Zoom levels have been floating point enhanced and now support mode accurate scaling when sizing templates to either the display or printed page. Available zoom levels now range from 5-400 percent.

Template keystroke errors are now identified by offset in the template string from the Format Region Properties dialog.

Samples

The template for AutoCAD LT 1.0 and 2.0 has been dropped. If you would like this template, please contact Digitizer Technology.

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Last modified: March 04, 2008