Changing touch keyboard (and pen) input, esp. to Win7/Vista mode

Is there any way to change the touch keyboard's appearance, especially the pen input? I actually have a capable stylus on my HP Touchsmart tm2t convertible tablet, and I hate having 40% of my screen taken up every time I want to write something in while in tablet mode because Windows 8 abandoned the effective Win7/Vista tablet pen input option and went with the huge touch keyboard instead. Is there at least some way to make the touch keyboard significantly smaller, and accessible from any text input when in tablet mode, so I don't get stuck with no way to use pen input during Metro mode? Possibly I'm missing some basic setting that makes pen input more convenient in Win8?

i'd like to know this aswell
the option to select the pen mode keyboard is there however it is greyed out for some reason (4th option from the left) while the touch keyboard shouldn't be available since i don't have a touch display

also there's no option to instantly call up the keyboard when i place the cursor in a text field (the same problem berzerker is having apparently)
i'm using an HP tc4400 with win 8 professional 32bit, all necessary drivers installed and up to date (as much as is possible with a convertible this old)
now i realize my brick is very old and i can't expect everything to work flawlessly with vista drivers but it would still be great if you guys knew of some workaround
maybe just a minor fix in the registry? because everything else seems to be working just fine.. better than with vista actually...
thanks in advance