Sometimes the fastest way to capture an idea is to draw it. The palette's Draw category holds the drawing tools: Freehand for smooth strokes kept exactly as drawn, the Shape Pen for rough sketches that snap to real shapes, and the Polygon tool for clean point-by-point outlines (plus Arrow, covered in its own guide). Everything they draw is a regular element you can move, resize, and style.
Looking for the marker? The Highlighter is a canvas mode now, not a draw tool: see Highlighter.
Freehand and the Shape Pen
Both pens are gestural tools: pick one from the palette's Draw category (Freehand is P, Shape Pen is 6) and the next drag on the canvas draws a stroke. A small mode banner tells you which pen is armed, with a Cancel action, and the cursor swaps to a pen icon so you know you are in draw mode.
The only difference is what happens on release: Freehand keeps the stroke exactly as you drew it, and the Shape Pen matches it against real shapes.
Release to commit the stroke. A stray click with no drag does not create anything.
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.
The Polygon tool
The Polygon tool fills the gap between freehand sketching and the fixed shapes: clean, straight-edged outlines with exactly the corners you choose, for zones on an architecture diagram, floor plans, or any irregular region.
Click to place each point. A preview line follows your pointer from the last point you placed.
Click the start point (a snap ring appears when you are close) to close the outline into a
filled polygon, or double-click (or press Enter) to finish an open line at the last
point.
While placing points, Backspace removes the last point so you can walk a mistake back without starting over, and Escape clears the in-progress outline. A closed polygon fills with the theme's fill colour like any closed sketch; an open line stays stroke-only.
Shape recognition
Pick the Shape Pen instead of Freehand 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.
Nothing is remembered between strokes: Freehand always keeps what you drew and the Shape Pen always tries to convert it, so a stroke never behaves differently from the last one for reasons you cannot see.
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