Drawing and Sketch

Sometimes the fastest way to capture an idea is to draw it. The Pencil tool lets you sketch freehand on the canvas, producing smooth hand-drawn strokes you can move, resize, and style like any other element. An optional shape-recognition mode goes one step further and turns rough sketches into real shapes.

The Pencil tool

The Pencil is a gestural tool: pick it from the palette (or press F), and the next drag on the canvas draws a stroke. A small mode banner reads "Drag to draw" with a Cancel action, and the cursor swaps to a pencil glyph so you know you are in draw mode.

On release, your raw points are smoothed into a clean, hand-drawn curve rather than a jagged polyline. If you release near where you started, the path closes into a custom shape and fills, which is the way to sketch a bespoke outline.

Styling a sketch

A committed sketch is a regular boxed element. Its stroke colour follows the tab's theme so it reads as part of the diagram rather than a separate annotation layer, and a closed path fills with the theme's fill colour. From there you can:

• Move it, resize it (the path scales proportionally), and lock or group it.
• Recolour its stroke and fill from the element's Colours controls.
• Apply the format painter, themes, and comments, exactly as with any shape.

Shape recognition

Turn on shape recognition from the magic-wand toggle in the Pencil's banner, and your sketches are matched against real shapes on commit. A rough square becomes a square, a loop becomes a circle, and a straight stroke becomes an arrow. See Shape recognition for the details and which kinds are detected.