If there’s one thing that doesn’t exist in this world, then it’s good drawing tablet drivers. No matter if you get a cheap tablet or an extremely expensive Wacom Cintiq, you will come to despise the drivers with all your soul sooner or later.
Some issues have causes that are out of your control and near to impossible to track to their source, like your PC hardware component configuration, operating system or bugs in drawing tablet drivers. But most issues will be fixable, and here I listed everything I know and was able to find about this topic. So that when an issue pops up (most of which render your tablet completely unusable), one can simply go through this list instead of having to search around for hours in threads. Most of these things are universal and apply to any drawing tablet brand.
I’ll refer to the GUI and drivers of drawing tablets as drawing tablet drivers, to keep things simple.
Pen Key Maps
Most software will need custom pen key maps to work. Don’t rely on your drawing tablet driver to keep them, and make sure to note them down somewhere. Or alternatively use the ones that I listed under the hotkey page of every software.
Huion drivers are here: https://www.huion.com/download
List of bugs
| Bugs, Problems & Unwanted Behaviour | Fixes | Occurance |
|---|---|---|
| Circle appears around pen when right clicking | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0Gty6Ckgw0 | very common |
| Every couple of seconds, the pen cursor freezes for 1 second and then teleports to the new cursor location, behaving normally for a couple of second until freezing again. | very common | |
| Pen buttons don’t release a click at random. | This is most likely not because your pen is broken, but due to driver bugs. For Huion, reverting to an older driver version (in my case for the 22 plus the 15.7.4.195 version) fixes this bug, more about that in this thread. To test this easily, you can use mouse click website like https://www.onlinemictest.com/mouse-test/ | not that common |
| Pressure sensitivity doesn’t work or feels off | Check out the drawing tablet driver pressure sensitivity graph or see if the art software is maybe changing it, or look at general fixes below. | not that common |
| Pen cursor on wrong screen or Pen teleports to side of screen | Make sure the working area option is set up correctly and that it’s set to full area | common |
| Pen tip has slight offset to cursor | Some drawing tablet drivers have a monitor calibration button somewhere under the working area. It might also be because your drawing tablet might innately have a longer distance. | common |
| Pen buttons not working | This is most likely because your drivers aren’t recognizing your pen and the Windows built-in pen feature is letting you draw (mostly happens after buying a new stylus). Re-install the drawing tablet drivers. | |
| The drawing tablet driver doesn’t let you assign buttons like mouse button 5 and 6. | Get creative and change the respective hotkeys in art software to long combinations that you would never use, and then use those for the pen buttons in your driver software. Or alternatively, buy a drawing tablet from a company that knows to create proper software (Huion is sadly missing M5 and M6) |
General fixes
- Disable windows ink. If the drawing tablet driver has that option, then that’s the best place to disable it. It’s very important that you disable windows ink on every profile, so for “All Porgrams” and for the software specific pen profiles! (This is the most common reason for pen issues. If your drawing tablet driver doesn’t have)
- If the drawing tablet driver has a windows ink setting, disable it (sometimes rarely enabling it can fix an issue, but in general, any sort of windows ink should be off)
- Make sure all the cables that are supposed to connect between computer and tablet are in the correct ports and firmly inserted
- Make sure your graphics card drivers are up-to-date and also check if your operating system is up-to-date
- When buying a new stylus, make sure that it’s from the actual company and the pen model is compatible with your drawing tablet model
- Reset the graphics tablet driver software to default settings (this one very often fixes the issue at hand. If possible, export the software specific pen key configs, or note it down somewhere)
- Re-plug the cables from the drawing tablet
- Re-installing tablet drivers (really make sure to remove everything)
- Try closing other software that might be interfering (software that I’ve heard other have problems with: L-Connect 3)
- Restart computer (almost never fixes anything, only do as a last resort)
- Uninstall drivers of other graphics tablet companies (only do this as a very last resort, it has fixed things for me before. Support loves recommending this fix, as they have an incentive for you to uninstall competitor’s software. I also find the fact that graphics tablet drivers interfere with each other highly suspicious, or it’s simply windows being very stupid)
- Try giving your drawing tablet drivers admin control
- Try installing a older version of your drawing tablet drivers
- Your pen nib might be very worn off (this is unlikely to fix any issues)
Some videos that help with troubleshooting: