This will be a technical post including some solutions to problems I have had when using my Toshiba tablet PC/laptops. I will also discuss some of the settings I have chosen to help when I give lectures. I expect that I will continue to update this post or add comments to it with further information.
The background to this is my current style of lecturing. I usually prepare a pdf skeleton of my lecture with gaps to be fill in. I then generate a Windows Journal note from the pdf file, and give my lectures using this note (adding additional pages if necessary) and a data projector. Additionally, I may make audio recordings of my lectures. I then make all of the resulting materials available to students from my module web pages.
This autumn (technology permitting!) I will use Camtasia to make movies (with synchronized sound) of all of my lectures, and I will make these movies available to students.
Up until now I have been using a Toshiba Portege (or Portégé to be more accurate) model M400. However, my School have now bought me a more powerful Toshiba Portégé M750-116 to assist with my Camtasia project. I am still setting the new machine up, and this should lead to further additions to this post. Note, in particular, that this new machine is widescreen.
My initial list of “solutions” below is in reverse chronological order, with the most recent additions at the top. However, I will continue to add further solutions as comments.
September 15 2009
I am disappointed with the quality when I export my pdf files for use in Windows Journal
Note that I use the seminar document class to produce A4 portrait pdf slides for my lectures. (See an earlier post for more about this.)
However, most of the time I view these slides at full page width, so that only half of each slide is visible at any one time on the data projector screen.
On my M400, I found that the pdf “lecture skeleton” files I had produced using pdflatex looked fine on the screen, but when I printed them using the virtual printer Journal Note Writer to produce Window Journal notes the results were disappointing. However, when I used Acrobat Professional/Distiller to “Improve” the pdf file, then the results were much better. To do this, I opened the document in Adobe reader (not Adobe professional), and then I printed using the virtual printer called Adobe PDF. Here are some of the settings I used for this by default, and which helped in my case. (I recommend experimentation, though, to see what happens when you change these options, in case you need different scaling/orientation from me.)
Printer: Adobe PDF
Page Scaling: None
Auto-Rotate and Center: checked
Choose Paper Source by PDF page size: unchecked
Under Properties for the printer
In the Adobe PDF Settings tab:
Adobe PDF Page Size: A4
Default Settings: High Quality
Do not send fonts to “Adobe PDF”: unchecked
This last can be particularly important! (Note the double negative here.) In some cases, if you fail to send fonts at this point then the resulting file comes out as illegible garbage. I found that I could not rely on system fonts, and that I needed to allow the document to supply fonts. [Different versions of Adobe Acrobat use varying terminology here.]
Having obtained a higher quality pdf document, the next stage is to open this new version in Adobe Reader and to print this improved pdf file to the virtual printer Journal Note Writer. Again, the settings may make a difference here. Here are the default settings I used on my M400.
Printer: Journal Note Writer
Auto-Rotate and Center: checked
Choose Paper Source by PDF page size: unchecked
Then, in the printer properties
In the Page tab
Page size: A4
Width: 21 cm
Height: 29.7 cm
Orientation: Portrait
In the Advanced tab
Output Format: Use standard printing
September 7 2009
No matter what I do, I end up with the wrong display orientation on my tablet
There is a standard control panel Tablet and Pen Settings: in the “Display” tab you can specify your preferred orientation, and also you can choose to change the sequence of orientations the tablet uses if you use a tablet button to change orientation.
BUT this control panel can be overruled by the Toshiba Tablet PC Rotation Utility, which you can find via the Start Menu.
On both the M400 and the M750 I found this under
Start Menu -> All Programs -> Toshiba-> Tablet PC -> Rotation Utility
I prefer to use my tablet in landscape mode at all times.
When using it as a laptop, the orientation Primary Landscape is almost essential.
When using it as a tablet, I have not yet decided between Primary Landscape and Secondary Landscape. (Currently I am experimenting with the latter, but I have not yet resolved some of the issues. The former works fine.)
September 4 2009
Menus keep opening while I am trying to write in Windows Journal.
This and other strange behaviour I observed was due to me accidentally clicking the tablet pen side button while writing. Not everyone has this problem! In my case, I had to disable the tablet pen side button completely.
- On the M400: There are two relevant control panels, and also some options within Windows Journal.I started with the control panel Tablet and Pen Settings and, in the Pen Options tab, I unchecked “Use pen button to right click”.
However, I still observed some unusual effects when I pressed the button while writing. Further investigation revealed another control panel, Pen Tablet, which, under the Pen tab, allows you to disable the tablet pen buttons completely. In my case, this control panel appears to be designed for a pen with two side-buttons (in addition to the tip and the eraser). My tablet pen has only one of these side buttons: the one I needed to disable was the side-button shown as nearest to the tip in the control panel.
Finally, in Windows Journal, under Tools->Options->Other, I unchecked “Enable press and hold while writing” for additional safety. (This still allows you to obtain a right click using “press and hold” under other circumstances.)
- On the M750: The first difference here is that, on this machine, by default, “touch” is enabled so that you can use your finger instead of the tablet pen for some purposes. This caused me trouble, so I used the Touch Settings control panel, and unchecked the “Enable touch” box. However, I made the mistake of also unchecking “Press-and-Hold to Right-Click” here, and this disabled press-and-hold for the tablet pen too. Be warned!The control panel Tablet and Pen Settings is as above.
There is no Pen Tablet control panel on this machine, so I do not know for certain whether I have completely deactivated the pen button this time. I have not, however, been able to produce any ill-effects by pressing the button while writing.
The Windows Journal press-and-hold options are as above.
Joel Feinstein