Courtesy of
Schaefer Enterprises & Associates
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When installing a digitizer it is confusing to determine if the problem lies with the digitizer hardware, serial port, AutoCAD or a custom menu, like SEA's SUPER MENU. An easy way to reduce the variables (and vendors) is to use AutoCAD's menu until all is working and then use AutoCAD's MENU command to re-activate the custom menu. |
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DO NOT CALL SEA UNTIL YOU HAVE A FULLY FUNCTIONAL INSTALLATION USING AUTOCAD’s NATIVE MENU, ACAD.MNU OR ACADFULL.MNU WITH YOUR DIGITIZER AND THEN RE-ACTIVATE SUPER MENU. |
In spite of the Windows tendency to promote the use of mice over digitizers, the digitizer is still more productive when locating AutoCAD functions and their options. If you count the number of mouse clicks versus digitizer puck clicks, the digitizer user always wins. Of course, most menus today also allow access to all of their features through the pull down menus, dialog boxes and keyboard shortcuts.
Tech Support pages from Autodesk:
Other Digitizer Support Pages:
Some of the Autodesk documents refer to a specific version of AutoCAD,R13 Win (some R12 too) and many digitizers have an installation problem that happens in almost every new digitizer installation. This has nothing to do with a custom menu. After solving this problem the first time the digitizer will behave as expected there after.
When you try TABLET/CFG and enter 25 as the number of columns, you will get the message "too many columns for area specified".
When you digitize area 3, you get the message "points do not form 90 degrees".
First, using the MENU command, switch to the AutoCAD menu and make your digitizer and AutoCAD overlay function before you trying a custom menu. This will isolate the problems to AutoCAD, your AutoCAD dealer and the digitizer manufacturer.
Using TABLET/CFG, tell it you have 0 (zero) tablet areas. Then tell it you want to configure the pointing area. When asked for the lower left and upper right corners, select the physical extents of the whole digitizer board, outside of the overlay. You can tell if you are at the limits by observing the LED. Then re-enter TABLET/CFG and proceed normally with the 4 areas and normal screen pointing area.
When selecting the corner points of the 4 tablet areas, pick points that are 1/32nd inch toward the center of the area. This way no areas will overlap.
Make sure your digitizer is setup for absolute coordinates, not relative (mouse mode).
Turn your system on/off (cold boot), including the digitizer (off for 10 seconds).
If using mole mode, setting it up for the top 1/3 of the screen pointing area is a good choice. If the mole mode area overlaps the tablet areas, they will be disabled.
Here the digitizer may appear to work, including tablet configuration, but you can’t select commands from the tablet. Go to control panel and open the SERVICES applet. Scroll down the services until you see WINTAB32. Double click on WINTAB32. In the dialog that activates, make sure that the toggle "Wintab active in all application windows" is "X"ed.
Call the digitizer manufacturer. We offer this letter as a service, but we do not assume any liability for the functioning of the digitizer and AutoCAD - only SUPER MENU software.
Post your questions on Compuserve in the AutoCAD forum.
Download digitizer related documents from the Compuserve AutoCAD forum. For instance there’s a good one on Mole mode.
Download the latest digitizer driver from the digitizer manufacturer’s BBS.
Problem R13: One or more tablet areas appear to be "dead". However, if you reload the ACAD.MNU/MNC/MNS file it works.
In ACAD.MNL, there is a section where it reads the ACADNT.CFG file looking for alternate tablet areas that are part of ACAD.MNU. If those areas were accessed before SUPER MENU was installed, then it will continue to try to set those areas even if SUPER MENU is loaded.
Since SM doesn't have corresponding alternate tablet areas, the areas are disabled.
- One way to fix the problem is to comment out the line (set_alt_tabs) ie, ;(set_alt_tabs) at approximately line 408.
- Another way is to manually edit the following line in \R13\WIN\ACADNT.CFG:
| [Menu] T_Menu=15 |
to | [Menu] T_Menu=0 |
- You could reload the ACAD menu and reset the alt tablet
areas to normal (row 1 of tablet area 4).- We have added the following line to our MNL file just before ACAD.MNL is loaded.
(setcfg "cfgdata/menu/t_menu" "0")
(load "acad.mnl")
This will change all of the tablet areas to normally without user intervention while allowing ACAD.MNU to function with alternate tablet menus.
This is the area you specify where the digitizer acts as a Windows system pointer (mouse) for the pull down menus. We recommend that you divide the existing screen pointing area as follows:
In R12 Windows these area are specified with CONFIG. This arrangement seems fairly natural because as you move to the pulldown bar, the cursor turns into a pointer without you having to do anything to switch modes.
The digitizer is the most effective way to learn and run your AutoCAD system and is well worth this initial hassle.
SUPER MENU Tech Support | Contact or link to digitizer manufacturers | SUPER MENU Lite Tech Support
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