Based on the search items 'tablet' and 'pressure' being quite high, I suspect people think they need to do mystical things to get their tablet pressure to work in Krita.
I think it might be best to write a page that explains how tablet events end up from the tablet into Krita's brush engine, so that people understand why they should download and install tablet drivers, or why tablet drivers can prevent their tablet from working despite the hardware being fine.
I think new artists don't quite understand what tablets are or what they can do. These are some ideas that we might be able to include on the page:
Why a tablet is so nice compared to a mouse (pressure, rotation, tilt, ergonomics, etc)
What is the difference between different tablets and prices
How to use your tablet in Krita
How to make your tablet work the best with Krita (drivers)
Common problems with tablets
We also need to warn for other applications interfering with the tablet config. Sandboxie can mess things up, and here's someone with some Razer deamon running off with Krita in the tablet log: https://www.reddit.com/r/krita/comments/56dcw9/tablet_pressure_not_working_help_please/
Edit: seems the only way to deal with something like the above is either deinstaling or using group policy? https://www.reddit.com/r/razer/comments/4e1ab8/razeringameengineexe_causes_league_of_legends_to/
Ok, first draft, needs lots of pictures:
This page is about drawing tablets, what they are, how they work, and where it can go wrong. The latter bit is maybe a bit technical, but the images should help clarify.
Drawing with a mouse can be a bit tricky. Even worse, drawing with a mouse can result in scary wrist-trouble. That’s why most people draw digitally with a so-called drawing tablet.
A drawing tablet is a piece of hardware that you can plug into your machine, much like a keyboard or mouse. It usually looks like a plastic pad, with a stylus, but there’s also monitors with styluses. This is better than a mouse because it’s more natural to draw with a stylus and generally better for your wrists.
Furthermore, with a properly installed tablet stylus, Krita ca get information like pressure sensitivity, allowing you to make strokes that get bigger or smaller depending on the pressure you put on them.
{{Info|Sometimes, people confuse finger-touch styluses with a proper tablet. You can tell the difference because a drawing tablet stylus usually has a pointy nib, while a stylus made for finger-touch has a big rubbery round nib, like a finger. Krita can’t use finger-touch input at the moment. }}
So you have bought a tablet, a real drawing tablet. And you wanna get it to work with Krita! so you plug in the USB cable, start up Krita and... it doesn’t work! Or well, you can make strokes, but that pressure sensitivity you heard so much about doesn’t seem to work.
This is because you need to install a little program called a ‘driver’. Now usually you can find the driver on a CD that was delivered alongside your tablet, or on the website of the manufacturer. Go install it, and while you wait, we’ll go into the details of what it is!
If you have a computer, then you have a base program running on it that does all the tricky bits of running a computer for you. This is the operating system, or OS. Most people use an operating system called Windows, but people on an Apple device have an operating system called MacOS, and some people, including many of the developers use a system called Linux.
The base principle with all of them is the same though: You have hardware bits of your computer, and you have the programs you want to run, the software. But to have those two communicate can be really difficult, so we have the operating system, specifically the part we call the Kernel, working as a glue between the two, doing all the difficult bits like memory management, display, sound for you.
Whenever you start Krita, Krita will first make connections with the operating system, so it can ask it for a lot of these things: It would like to display things, and use the memory, and so on. Most importantly, it would like to get information from the tablet!
But it can’t! Turns out your operating system doesn’t know about tablets!
That’s what drivers are for. Installing a drivers makes a connection point so that Krita can get the information about the tablet!
{{Warning|Because drivers modify the operating system a little, you will always need to restart your computer when installing or deinstalling a driver, s don’t forget to do this! Conversely, because Krita isn’t a driver, you don’t need to even deinstall it to reset the configuration, just rename or delete the configuration file. }}
Krita automatically connects to your tablet if the drivers are installed. So when it goes wrong there’s nothing inside Krita you can do about it. The following bits are explanations of what could be wrong.
This is a bit silly, but tablets using n-trig, like the Surface Pro, need two drivers. This is because n-trig by default only has WinInk drivers, but Krita can only connect to Wintab-style drivers. See the FAQ for more info on this.
We’re not sure why, but sometimes a windows 10 update messes up tablet drivers. In that case, reinstalling the drivers should work.
Tablet drivers need to be made by the manufacturer. Sometimes, with really cheap tablets, the hardware is fine, but the driver is badly written, which means that the driver just doesn’t work well. We cannot do anything about this, sadly. You will have to sent a complaint to the manufacturer for this, or buy a better tablet with better quality drivers.
On Windows, you can only have a single wintab-style driver installed at a time. So be sure to deinstall the previous driver before installing the one that comes with the tablet you want to use. Other operating systems are a bit better about this, but even Linux, where the drivers are often preinstalled, cant run two tablets with different drivers at once.
Sometimes, there's software that tries to make a security layer between Krita and the operating system. Sandboxie is an example of this. However, Krita cannot always connect to certain parts of the operating system while sandboxed, so it will often break in programs like sandboxie. Similarly, certain mouse software, like Razer utilities can also affect whether Krita can talk to the operating system, converting tablet information to mouse information. This type of software should be configured to leave Krita alone, or be deinstalled.
https://docs.krita.org/Drawing_Tablets
still needs images, and proofreading, and a category...
I went through a quick proofread and edit of this manual page. I think it looks good and could be considered a complete first edition.