Tips for Touch Screen Digitizing

DTMGIS — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 21:38:22 GMT

Hello. I'm hoping someone can offer some advice on digitizing and editing in Pro using a touch screen laptop computer. This is a task that I could do quickly and easily in Desktop using my Surface Pro tablet computer. Now with Pro and an HP Envy Laptop, as recommended by some ESRI users, I can't seem to find a work flow that doesn't include endless shifting between a mouse, the keyboard and using a pen stylus on the touch screen. I do a lot of creating and reshaping linear features as seen on aerial imagery.

The pen stylus using Streaming Mode Tool is my primary digitizing tool for this work.

Here's my challenges:

1. The active reshaping tool - streaming, arc, etc. - does not stay active after ending a reshaping segment. It always reverts back to the Line Tool. Note that is submitted this as a separate question and ESRI has indicated that this is a known "bug". So likely there is little chance that it will ever be taken care of and it is now a "feature" of the software. This is annoying, but I can live with it for now.

2. Ending a line with a double tap, or even just a tap sometimes, of the pen stylus ends the segment AND zooms the display in so I have to reset the display scale before continuing. Accidental taps on the screen with the pen tip causes a Zoom.

3. I have to hoover the pen stylus over the surface of the display in order to Stream a line segment. If the stylus tip touches the surface of the display, the Pan tool is activated and the display is panned until I lift the tip of the stylus off the display, at which time it continues pauses the streaming line and I have to single tap to get the streaming line to resume.

I've tried:

1. Checking and Unchecking the "Touch Screen input for new features" option in the Editing Options dialog.

2. Changing every option in the Windows Pen & Windows Ink settings.

3. Updating Windows, all drivers, and ArcGIS Pro.

No matter what settings I try, Pro just does not want to allow me to get any work done. This was an extremely efficient work flow in Desktop. I could digitize hundreds of miles of features on screen with the stylus quickly and accurately. Early on I was excited to hear that Pro was being design to be "Tablet Friendly" for editing, but so far my experience has been more "Tablet Hostile"!

I'd love to get some input from users who are successfully using Pro on a touch screen computer using a pen stylus. Settings, workflow, work arounds, etc. would be much appreciated! I'm at a stand still now and can't even go back to Desktop because ESRI is no longer offering license codes for it.

Thanks!

Re: Tips for Touch Screen Digitizing

DTMGIS — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 15:03:42 GMT

I'm going to answer my own question here. I was never able to get a touch screen computer to work well with this sort of task. I was a game changer with Desktop, but Pro just did not want to behave.

So I found a couple random posts about people using a graphics drawing tablet for digitizing. I bought a Wacom Intuos Pro that's around 10.5 x 7" in size. It has six programmable buttons along the left side and a touch ring. I set it up so the top button is set to F8 (streaming), the next button down to "ctrl+c" for Pan, next down to "Double Click" to end a line/polygon, next down to select the "Reshape" tool, next is unused now, and the last button to ctrl + z (Undo). The touch ring is set to Zoom so I can run my finger around the ring to zoom in or out. I size the Pro app window on my screen to fill around 3/4 of my screen. And set the Wacom touch pad to cover that area. Note that using a full screen and setting the tablet working area to the screen required too much movement around the tablet.

With this setup I rarely need to touch my keyboard when digitizing. I can pan and zoom around quickly using the tablet, jump to reshape or add a new feature. Pretty slick. Even better than using the touch screen now that I'm in the groove.

Tips: Get a Drawing Glove - a two finger glove that helps your hand slide around the tablet easily. And I turned off the buttons on the Wacom stylus. I kept accidentally clicking those buttons.

topic Tips for Touch Screen Digitizing in ArcGIS Pro Questions

Tips for Touch Screen Digitizing

Re: Tips for Touch Screen Digitizing