There’s a strange building under construction at my bus stop downtown. It’s in the parking lot of an empty storefront, and it has no foundation. The contractors call it a movie set, and said “they” are going to “crash cars into it”. I’ll update if I learn more.

We have an undergrad intern at my company this summer working on some illustrations for one of our projects. She’s using Illustrator CS3 with an older USB Wacom Intuos tablet (ours) on a MacBook (hers). She installed the driver from Wacom’s website, and for the most part the tablet worked fine. However, when she tried to create a pressure-sensitive Caligraphic Brush, she found all the pressure-related options grayed out in the configuration dialog.

A quick review of Google results revealed a collection of useless leads. Forums tended to have people ask the question, only to have it go unsolved. I’m bothering to blog about this in the hope that someone else will find it, and my solution will work for them.

In the Wacom Pref Pane in System Preferences, it lists all installed tablets at the top of the page. Below that, it lists available “Tools” for the selected tablet. I noticed that our intern’s driver had two of the same 6×8 Intuos installed, and while one of them had a pen listed in Tools, the other only listed the function buttons. We hit the [ - ] button to remove the penless tablet, leaving only the copy with the pen. After a restart, Illustrator recognized the pen’s presence, and the grayed out options were restored.

If you’re having this problem and that doesn’t help, good luck in your search for an answer. Expect to find a lot of “reinstall the driver/Illustrator.”