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Keep in mind that gestures are contextual which means that they may do different things
depending on when or where you use them. Keep that in mind as you play with your Surface.
Using Your Surface Pen
Using the Surface Pen can be a bit confusing if you haven’t tried it before. Before we get into how
to use the pen, let’s go over some situations when you might want to use it instead of touch.
In general, the pen tends to work better than touch in the following situations:
Writing notes by hand
Drawing
Marking up documents
Taking signatures (like digital ink)
Writing math formulas
To make the pen easier to use, Microsoft included a few features that really improve the user
experience, like:
Palm Blocking: Your Surface is smart enough to know when you are holding the pen and
it will ignore your palm resting on the screen when the pen is near. This means that you
can write/draw on the screen of the Surface like you would on a piece of paper!
Pressure Sensitivity: Your Surface can tell how hard you’re pushing on the stylus and
differing degrees of pressure may have different results (depending on the application
you’re using). For example, Fresh Paint is a really cool drawing application that takes full
advantage of the stylus. Unfortunately, not every application supports pressure
sensitivity but the ones that do, are much better for it.
Next, let’s get into the basics of using your Surface pen. The pen has a writing tip, two buttons
and, an end button. You can see those parts listed in the picture below.
There are many applications that let you use the pen in different ways (like Fresh Paint,
mentioned above) but in general, the Surface pen simply acts much like a mouse.
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General
Weight and Dimensions
