Adding natural Pan Scrolling to a Huion tablet
SPOILER: this works only on Windows!
For some time now I was looking for a reasonable priced Wacom Intuos Pro alternative and after doing quite some digging on the web I finally decided to go with the Huion Inspiroy Q11K. For the awesome price of just $119.00 it looked like a real bargain, compared to the Intuos Pro Medium which is more than double selling at $349.95.
Now I’m not going to do a comparison or a review here, since it’s not the subject of this article, but I just want to mention that both tablets have similar specs with pens at 8192 pressure levels but I like the Inspiroy better because the active area compared to the body is bigger and also it has a closer ration to a regular wide screen monitor.
One more thing I want to mention is the quality build which is better than my older Intuos 5 Medium which squeaks like crazy if you move it around. Not sure about the quality built of the 2017 Intuos Pro model since I don’t own one.
So, moving on. From the get go I was very pleased with the feeling of the tablet and the pen. Had a bit of problem at first with the driver because I had to uninstall the Wacom software and driver before installing the Huion driver.
After giving it a spin in Photoshop and Paint Tool SAI I was very surprised by the amazing pen pressure sensitivity and I could really feel the difference compared to my Intuos 5. Now the first thing I do when I install the Wacom software is to set the lower pen button to Pan/Scroll… which I thing is what most users do because otherwise it’s a real pain to browse the web and navigate inside different apps especially when you have a lot of scrolling to do.
Now opening the Huion software you won’t get a lot of options but you get all the basics except for a damn option to Pan/Scroll… with the pen button! The closest option is to set the pen button as a middle mouse click which usually works in browsers and a few apps but now everywhere especially when you have to scroll various stuff. Of course I’ve contacted the guys at Huion and they replied back really fast the next day saying that for now their software does not support this function so I had to find a solution:
introducing Autohotkey!
This little old software still does wonders in the right hands. So speaking of the right hands, a user from the Autohotkey named cheek made this awesome script called DragToScroll.ahk that allows you to scroll any window or control by right clicking (RButton or MButton) and dragging the mouse. It works very similarly to the “Hand Tool” in Adobe products, such as Adobe PDF Reader.
Here’s the script: https://autohotkey.com/board/topic/55289-dragtoscroll-universal-drag-flingflick-scrolling/
Now pairing this little thingy with the pen button set to Middle Click Button you get a natural scrolling in any app. Now it’s not exactly like the Intuos Pan/Scroll… because you only have to press the pen button without touching the tablet with the pen tip, but it’s a pretty sweet temporary solution that works great, while the guys at Huion figure out how to do it themselves.
But in order to make the scrolling smooth and nice you have to tweak a bit the options of the script: right click on the Hand tray icon > Settings > All settings. Here are my recommended settings:
Now hopefully you’ll be able to enjoy your Huion tablet even more specially while using it to navigate around your computer.