How to detect if a windows app is Tablet PC “Aware”

Question

Does anyone know how I can determine if an application is able to accept Tablet PC input? i.e. some kind of hittest or windows message that I can send it?

thanks, H

Answer 1

The Tablet PC Input Panel (which as of Vista is available even on non-tablets other than the basic editions) will send input using the Text Services Framework (TSF) to an application that supports it. Otherwise it will send normal input messages to the application which basically means a bunch of simulated keyboard events.

I suspect you are trying to determine whether or not an application supports TSF which provides a much more integrated experience such as bidirectional correction interface, information about the current selection, context hints, etc.

I don't know if this is reliable but if the control in question is a rich edit, you could try the EM_GETEDITSTYLE message which has a SES_USECTF flag in the return value that indicates whether or not TSF is turned on for that control. But for standard edit controls I'm not so sure. This article on MSDN goes into much more detail about using the text services framework and is probably more than you care to implement.