On Sat, 5 Sep 2020 at 19:59, Ranjan Maitra <maitra@email.com> wrote:
On Sat, 5 Sep 2020 19:30:12 -0300 "George N. White III" <gnwiii@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sat, 5 Sep 2020 at 17:26, Ranjan Maitra <maitra@email.com> wrote:
>
> > Dear friends,
> >
> > With online instruction for large classes continuing into the near future,
> > I am looking at writing tablets and wondering if any of these can be
> > integrated into Fedora. My examples are from:
> >
> >
> > https://www.amazon.com/Mice-Keyboards-Computer-Add-Ons-Computers/b?node=172493
> >
> > I am not sure if these can do what I am hoping that they can, but I am
> > thinking of something hooked to my machine that is essentially like an
> > Elmo and can be "projected" via a share screen (using zoom) and recorded
> > (using, say, simplescreenrecorder).
> >
> > Do these things exist? Any suggestions? I do not want to give up my
> > current machine, and buying an unnecessary tablet laptop because that would
> > fragment my workspace (computer).
> >
>
> I have a large Wacom drawing board with a mouse and a stylus.  It is good
> for
> tweaking artwork, but for live video it is no substitute for writing
> mathematics on
> a whiteboard.
>
> You may find it better to point a camera at a whiteboard or pad of
> paper and use an erasable marker or Sharpie.    Last I checked,
> (Fedora 31)  the Wacom drivers didn't work with Wayland.

I see, thanks for this. Surprising that Wacom drivers don't work with Wayland. Wacom tablet seem to work fine for me all the way to Fedora 32.    I think some Wacom devices can use generic support for touchpad and tablet devices.

Perhaps I am not understanding your point.


The Professional Wacom has a "mouse" with a wheel and multiple buttons, the stylus 
has one button and is pressure sensitive.  The generic support mentioned in the above 
issue wasn't usable with my tablet.

The Wacom consumer grade tablets (Bamboo) I have used had Windows and macOS 
drivers that added features, but generally worked well on Windows (until the next 
updates), macOS, and linux when used with generic USB pointing device drivers.  
I think there were Bamboo models that used a stylus (I retired from a job working 
with people who spent time on research vessels in the North Atlantic.  Mice are 
not useful on ships at sea, so tablets and trackballs were needed when you 
couldn't use a laptop with a touchpad.  Users suffering from RSI using mice discovered 
that tablets and trackballs were helpful even on land).

All the simpler pointing devices are fine when working with text, but become 
cumbersome when working on detailed drawings or even simple line graphs
for use in presentations.   If you wanted to illustrate a point with a simple 
graph it was far better to make a crude drawing on paper, scan it, trace
it in inkscape to replace giggly hand-drawn lines with smooth curves, and
paste in annotations generated with TeX.  Clean looking text saves time
in lectures when students ask "is that an 'a' or an 'alpha'?", so I imagine
it is even more important for students using low res displays in a zoom
meeting. 


-- 
George N. White III