How 2 configure screenless tablet to use correct orientation and aspect ratio in Linux Mint Mate?

Tech Support Input Device Support
1

Type of device* : screenless tablet
Brand and version of the device: WACOM Bamboo CTH-470
System** : Linux Mint Mate; Mint 20.2 x86_64

Description of the issue (you can include screenshots):
Hi! I plugged my tablet in and it works!! Yay! Even pressure sensitivity works out of the box! I was just wondering if there is any way to actually configure the tablet and set up keybinds for it and stuff like that? The biggest problem is that I need to swap it to left handed mode because drawing upside down and inverted is much harder than I expected.

Also I am generally curious about how screenless tablets like this work in terms of aspect ratios. I’ve drawn on a screen tablet on my main PC for a really long time now, and it’s monitor has its own set resolution (1920x1080) so the aspect ratio of the drawing surface to the screen is pretty much 1:1. My laptop that I am trying to use the bamboo with has a pretty unusual resolution of 1366x768, and although I am not completely sure but it looks to me like my drawing surface on the tablet is more square (taller vertically) than my screen which has a more flatter widescreen kinda aspect to it.

I’ve been doodling in Krita a bit this morning and I honestly can’t tell because I can use my eye balls to make pretty close to ideal squares and circles, but I highly suspect that there is some weighted transform going on because when I touch the 4 corners of my tablet drawing surface they perfectly match with the 4 corners of my screen, which I could definitely be wrong about but it doesn’t look to me like the drawing area and my screen have the exact same shape. It looks to me like my tablet’s drawing area is more square and less rectangle than my screen is.

Basically what I want is when I (hypothetically) move my pen 1 inch right and 1 inch up, I want the cursor on my screen to move EXACTLY x pixels right and the same x pixels up. I don’t know if this is what it is doing already and I certainly don’t notice any significant deformation of my drawing but on the off chance that it is being slightly deformed to fit a different aspect ratio then I absolutely don’t want to take the risk of having my muscle memory ruined by using this tablet lol.

To do this I imagine there must be some way to perfectly map my screen’s aspect ratio onto the tablet so that the tablet has dead space above and below the shape of the screen on the drawing surface, so that movements on the X and Y plane of the tablet are translating to exactly the same movements on the X and Y of the screen.

what I think is going on:
tablet:

I----------------I
I----------------I
I----------------I
I----------------I

mapping to
I
V
screen:

I----------------I
I----------------I

what I want:
tablet:

|XXXXXXXXX|
I----------------I
I----------------I
|XXXXXXXXX|

mapping to
I
V
screen:

I----------------I
I----------------I

Sorry if this is a bit convoluted. Maybe I am overthinking things. But I definitely want to at least be able to switch from right to left hand mode and maybe change hardness settings or something, even if the above is impossible to achieve. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

edit: sorry i had to fix my trash ASCII art xD

2

With Wacom tablets (or any tablets in general) the Windows/Mac driver setup-config utility has a section for adjusting the ‘active’ area of the tablet.
This is set to be the entire tablet by default.
Then the entire tablet is ‘stretched’ to cover the entire monitor screen.

If they are of different aspect ratios then you get the effect you’ve noticed.
This is not good if you use the tablet+stylus for tracing printed images that you place on the tablet surface.
In that case, you can adjust the tablet’s active area to make it be the correct aspect ratio.

Using a Wacom tablet on Linux, which usually/often has Linux Wacom drivers, these are developed and maintained by an independent developer/support group. I don’t know who they are or where their website is.

As I understand it, the behaviour of the tablet is controlled by the contents of one or more configuration files which are stored somewhere.
So, I think you’d need to edit those in the correct way to adjust the active area.

Somebody else may be able to advise you about this.
Also, you can try the usual search engine thing with suitable search terms.
There may have been previous posts here about this subject so you can try the search facility at the top-right of the forum page.

3

I don’t know if Mate offers any configuration GUI, apparently not, but I only found older discussions about it.

KDE (with Xorg) apparently has the most comprehensive configuration tool, it does allow mapping the correct aspect ratio of the monitor, rotate the input (I have mine 180° rotated, because I’m left-handed too) and configure the additional buttons.

Without desktop integration, you’ll have to pass all the settings to xsetwacom directly, usually through a shell script run on login.
David Revoy has some example how to do it with the Gaomon tablet he tested, for example:

4

Annoyingly, each Linux desktop environment seems to come with their own tablet config GUI, or none at all. Mate doesn’t have one, Cinnamon does.

5

If you are using xorg, all the config utilities are front ent to xsetwacom commandline tool. Atleast wacom tablets are. So you can configure it with xsetwacom in a distro agnostic way. But it is a bit of a barrier and not user friendly

6

Up until last year I used a Wacom Bamboo on Linux mint. To change the mapping coordinates open your configuration file and add a “Area” line substituting your preferred values:

Area x1 y1 x2 y2

Set the tablet input area in device coordinates in the form top left x/y and bottom right x/y.

I used full screen so did not set an Area value.
This was my old settings file:

#!/bin/sh

## Info at: http://linuxwacom.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Tablet_Configuration
## To run this script at startup save it as: $HOME/bin/.xsetwacom.sh
## To make it executable: chmod +x $HOME/bin/.xsetwacom.sh
## Will not survive a hotplug without Wdaemon - just run again

##Stylus
xsetwacom set "Wacom Bamboo Pen Pen stylus" Button 1 1
xsetwacom set "Wacom Bamboo Pen Pen stylus" Button 2 3 # Map button 2 to 3
xsetwacom set "Wacom Bamboo Pen Pen stylus" Button 3 2 # Map button 3 to 2
xsetwacom set "Wacom Bamboo Pen Pen stylus" PressureCurve 0 50 50 100 # very soft
# xsetwacom set "Wacom Bamboo Pen Pen stylus" PressureCurve 0 0 100 100 # linear,default
# xsetwacom set "Wacom Bamboo Pen Pen stylus" PressureCurve 50 0 100 50 # very firm
xsetwacom set "Wacom Bamboo Pen Pen stylus" Rotate none # none,cw, half, ccw
xsetwacom set "Wacom Bamboo Pen Pen stylus" Mode Absolute # absolute, relative (mouse mode)