So, as the title suggests, its all about using wacom enabled pen and a convertible with Xara Designer Pro. Lenovo Yoga 320, in my case.

A backstory is that i wanted to go seriously mobile with a small powerful touchscreen and also eliminate an extra weight of a wacom tablet. Screen drawing with a lightweight pen seemed like a perfect alternative. This post is about how it has turned out.

So, first of all, the pen (latest version of it, i deem, native Lenovo Active Pen 2) works, like, ok. The tip does not glide that smoothly touching the screen plastic, and it has an AAAA (like, what the hell is four A?) battery plus two super tiny separate batteries for bluetooth, but its fine. Its hovering, its very precise, it has pressure and even tilt, thou i might be mistaken with the latter (Xara suppots none, anyways). The pen works amazingly in Photoshop and quite decent in Inkscape. Nothing goes wrong. It's Xara where it becomes a semi-painful experience :(

First of all, pressure is just beyond any logic. If i need a hand-drawn line about 2pt thick i need a 200pt setting to draw it with pressure enabled. The program seems to believe i'm not pressing hard enough (harder would penetrate the screen, thou). If there is any way to tune up Xara pressure interpretation, i'm so so glad for any clues. Thats something active pen specific, it has not ever happened with regular wacom pens anytime before.

Secondly, it's this shift-control thing. Seems like Wacom driver is intercepting some of the keyboard keys to process them in its own way. In most programs, the only difference you'd notice is a Cntrl of Shift badge next to a pointer while the modifier key is pressed down and the pen is touching the screen (or tablet, in case of a regular wacom). In Xara it would often make the program lose the modifier completely (it seems that Xara also has its own way to process those keys and they are not best friends with Wacom driver). I've been facing this problem for years with any wacom tablet i had but it would only come up once in a while and go away after reboot. So, not too frustrating.

But it's persistent with the Active Pen. It's always there. I use my finger instead to multiple select with SHIFT key cos once i touch the screen with a pen instead the SHIFT badge appears and Xara starts ignoring the modifier completely. Using touchpad or finger touch is a workaround but solving the problem completely would be just awesome. Not being able to control and shift select with a pen is making working on projects so much slower :(

In general, it feels like Xara is not really cool with active pen. It crashes more often, etc. PS is fine. Inkscape is great. But Xara's unfrendliness with wacom has kind of come to the high point after the introduction of touchscreen convertibles. It's sad. It's frustrating. But lets hope for future fixes.

It's still just cool to have a 1.2 kilo laptop that is screen-drawable. No more need for a tablet, no more dreaming of cuintiq. As after (someday in the futur) Xara starts working just fine with screen pens, it'll be a blast.