Scale your Wacom tablet to a single monitor

Tips, Tricks and Tutorials Tried & Tested
#1

Preface

From my experiance, Wacom tablets work out of the box on Ubuntu mate 16.04 LTS but they are scaled across your entire monitor array. This is fine if you only have one monitor but if you have 2 or more, you will find your drawings are warped.

The following solution worked for my but every monitor array is different, not all monitors can be the same size or positioned perfectly next to eachother. This may not work for you

Scale to a single monitor

There is a command line utility that allows you to configure the wacom tablet on ubuntu mate, it can be accessed with the command xsetwacom in the terminal

  1. Identify your tablet and pen name
    xsetwacom --list devices
    For me, this returned
    Wacom Intuos S 2 Pen stylus id: 8 type: STYLUS
    Wacom Intuos S 2 Pad pad id: 9 type: PAD

  2. Find your tablet resolution (replace the name of my stylus with yours)
    xsetwacom --get "Wacom Intuos S 2 Pen stylus" area
    This will return 4 values, keep these safe for if this doesn’t work for you, you’ll want to revert to these later on

  3. Get the resolutions for all your monitors
    Find this by opening “Displays” from the control centre
    I have 2 1920x1080 monitors stacked side by side

  4. Maths
    The tablet is scaled across your monitor array like so http://imgur.com/pnqO3Is
    What you have to do is calculate the tablets equivalent of one monitor and have it scale to that instead, like so http://imgur.com/bmBYVO0

For me, that means I have to double the x size on the tablet so it pretends it’s twice as long (even though it isn’t) meaning that the portion of the tablet that actually exists will perfectly map onto the first monitor

Put your new x and y coordinates into the following command in place of mine
xsetwacom --set "Wacom Intuos S 2 Pen stylus" area 0 0 30400 9500

It should be noted that if I wanted to map the tablet to my second monitor instead, I could make the tablet pretend it was twice as long in the other direction like so
xsetwacom --set "Wacom Intuos S 2 Pen stylus" area -15200 0 15200 9500

4 Likes
Wacom control panel
#2

Or just use xrandr to get a list of currently plugged in monitors, and use xsetwacom set "Wacom Intuos4 6x9 stylus" MapToOutput VGA1 and replace “Wacom Intuos4 6x9 stylus” by one of the devices found in xsetwacom --list devices

Note : if you use nvidia drivers, you need to use HEAD-0, HEAD-1 or another HEAD instead of the output from xrandr

Source

2 Likes
#3

Aah, I am on nvidia drivers and I was wondering why that command wasn’t accepting DVI-I-1

#4

Ressurecting this somewhat old thread, I’m looking for a way to configure cursor speed while in touch mode.

I checked the parameters for xsetwacom and couldn’t figure out which one would do this for me. I’m trying to make the cursor move faster. For scrolling I found what would work, but no luck for simply moving around with my finger across the tablet.

Any ideas?

#5

I have multiple monitors with different resolutions and i use Wacom Intuos CTL 6100M
1st 1280x1024
2nd 1920x1080
3rd 1680x1050

  1. Manually I switched the tablet back into "PC mode" by holding down the two outermost ExpressKeys for 3-4 seconds. Note that if the tablet is already in "PC mode", doing this will switch it into "Android mode", in order to use the whole area of the tablet not the 1/3 of android mode.

xsetwacom --list devices
*Wacom Intuos BT M Pen stylus id: 9 type: STYLUS *
*Wacom Intuos BT M Pad pad id: 10 type: PAD *
*Wacom Intuos BT M Pen eraser id: 20 type: ERASER *
Wacom Intuos BT M Pen cursor id: 21 type: CURSOR

xsetwacom --set 9 area -14400 0 40600 13500
The exact coordinations found by checking multiple configurations and are related to the second monitor.

2 Likes
#6

As someone who is still struggling with her WACOM tablet and two monitor set up, thank you so much for these tips.

#7

Thaaaank You :grin: Was so confused when my Wacom intuos suddenly started to use only 1/3 of the area