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Can I enable some kind of "precision pen mode" on my android tablets?

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# The Background I want to annotate PDFs on my tablet, which I tried several apps for. All of them had the same problem: my fingers are too big to write smallish characters on the screen. Telling this to a friend, she gave me a pen of hers (so unfortunately I don't know the brand), it is an active one (needs to be switched on) and works well when drawing longer lines. However, the problem with drawing small letters or digits remained, they mostly wouldn't show up, or only some of the strokes. To debug this, I installed an app called "mobile screen and display tools" which can detect display touches and displays a crosshair where it detects a touch. This revealed some very annoying behaviour: - Touching the screen with the pen, then moving the pen in a small circle (5 pixels?) around the original touch point will *not* update the touch position. - Touching the screen, moving the pen by a cm or two, then doing the same circular motion *will* update the touch position. So it seems to me that the display is perfectly able to detect single pixel movements, but it decides to ignore them directly after a touch. It won't ignore them after a decisive pen move. Which explains the problem I had with drawing smallish letters/digits: larger strokes will be recognized - small ones won't. I *assume* this is a "usability feature" on android so people using their finger (inadvertantly wiggling the finger a bit) won't trigger a "move" when they want to trigger a "touch". This happens on a new BlackView Tab 10 Pro tablet (Android 11), an older Lenovo Yoga Yt-X703L tablet (Android 7.1.1) and a Huawei P20 phone with EMUI 12, so it doesn't seem to be related to the hardware, vendor, or android version. # The question Is there a way to tell android devices "I'm using a pen; if I move it after touching the display, even by just one pixel, treat that as a move and not as an accidential finger wriggle"?
Asked by Guntram Blohm (121 rep)
Nov 18, 2022, 07:53 AM