If you want to use a digitizing tablet for tracing, or digitizing, the tablet needs to be calibrated to the paper drawing, photograph, or other graphic material. The purpose of calibration is to align the paper drawing with the tablet and to establish a proportional relationship between point locations on the paper drawing and locations on the surface of the tablet. After the tablet is calibrated, you can enter commands such as Line, Polyline, Arc, and Circle to trace the existing drawing. If the paper drawing is too big to fit on the tablet, you can trace the drawing in portions, making sure to calibrate the tablet with each portion in turn.
In AutoCAD LT, using a digitizing tablet in this manner is called Tablet mode. You can turn Tablet mode on and off by using the Tablet option on the Tools menu or the TABLET command.
For more information about calibrating a tablet, see TABLET.
Any command that requires you to select objects with the tablet pointer still works in Tablet mode. For example, to erase an object, start ERASE and move the tablet pointer until the pickbox is over the object.
When you use both a mouse and a digitizing tablet, you can exclude mouse input from the calibrated pointing area on your tablet. When the Preferences dialog box is set to accept only tablet pointer input, the mouse will still operate normally in all other areas.
You can calibrate the tablet to digitize drawings and keep the tablet menu areas configured; however, make sure that the area you are tracing on the paper drawing does not overlap the tablet menu areas. Depending on the size of your tablet and the size of the paper drawing, you may need to reconfigure the tablet for zero menus with the fixed screen-pointing area on the tablet big enough for the paper drawing.
If you want to switch from a tablet calibrated for tracing drawings to a tablet configured for a tablet overlay, you must reconfigure the tablet, because usually the fixed screen-pointing area used for tracing drawings is larger.