Using a Wacom CTE-430 Sapphire Tablet with OS X Yosemite - Cobbled Code

I recently bought a Macbook Air with OS X Yosemite installed and tried to using my spare Wacom Sapphire CTE-430 tablet with it. Wacom unfortunately does not support older tablets. At least not explicitly. As it turns out you can use an older driver to get the tablet up and running.

  1. Make sure there are no newer drivers installed on your system
  2. Download the PenTablet_5.2.6-5.dmg driver from the legacy drivers download page (Select Graphire3 (CTE) for OS X)
  3. Install the driver in the PenTablet_5.2.6-5.dmg file.
  4. Rejoice!

Tablet Settings

The preference pane that comes with the driver won’t run on OS X Yosemite. Changing the tablet settings requires manually editing the preference file.

As an example, the standard configuration defines the lower stylus button as right click, the upper as double left click. I prefer to have the bottom button perform a left click and the top button a right click. Let’s do something about that.

  • Open the settings file in your favourite text editor:
    ~/Library/Preferences/com.wacom.pentablet.prefs
  • Find TransducerLowerButtonSettings, change the ButtonFunction value from 3 (right click) to 1 (left click)
  • Find TransducerUpperButtonSettings, change the ButtonFunction value from 4 (left double click) to 3 (right click)

To apply the new settings restart the computer.

Alternatively you can quit the ‘TabletDriver’ and ‘PenTabletDriver’ processes via the Activity Monitor application, then restart the tablet driver by opening /Library/Application\ Support/Tablet/PenTabletDriver.app.

4 thoughts on “Using a Wacom CTE-430 Sapphire Tablet with OS X Yosemite

  1. Thanks, this has been so useful!
    Just a question, my tablet seems to be stuck on mouse mode, do you know what pref line I have to modify to change to pen mode? Thanks!

  2. many thanks, how can make small area from the tablet area, I’m only use 45% of lower left area

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