User Guides and Screencasts

Screencasts (video screen capture) and quick instructions for end users to start using Pencil in just half an hour.

Working with Document

Screencast: Working-With-Document.ogv (4 mins, ~27.6 MB, Ogg Theora video)

How can I use the Ogg Theora video format?
Table of contents:
  1. Pencil Document Overview
  2. Working with Pages
    1. Creating a New Page
    2. Changing Page Properties
  3. Exporting Page and Document
    1. Exporting a Page
    2. Exporting the Whole Document

Pencil Document Overview

A Pencil document contains multiple pages. Each page in the document is a drawing canvas that: has a title, is sized at a specific size and may have an another page as its background.

Each Pencil document can be saved in a single XML-based file with the .ep extension. The .ep file format specification are being composed and will be published right after the preparation is done. The .ep file format will be made open and can be used with absolutely no restrictions.

Working with Pages

Each page in Pencil is shown in the drawing pane as a separated tab. Pages in a document can be create, modified or deleted freely.

Creating a New Page

To create a new page, you can click on the 'Add New Page' button located at the far upper right corner of the drawing pane. When creating a new page you can:

Changing Page Properties

You can change the properties of a specific page by right clicking on its tab to activate the context menu and select the Properties menu entry.

Exporting Page and Document

Contents in a Pencil document are stored and manipulated in the SVG format and can be rasterized into PNG files easily. The resulted PNG files are ideal for transferring your diagrams to other people since the PNG format are supported by almost the the platforms. When exporting your diagrams, you can choose to export only a specific page or a whole document.

Exporting a Page

To export a page in your document, just navigate the that page by selecting its tab and then choose the Document > Export Page as PNG... menu entry in the main menu bar. Pencil will then ask you for the location to save the PNG file.

Exporting the Whole Document

To export all pages in the document in one step, just select the Document > Export Document as PNGs... menu entry in the main menu bar. Pencil will then ask you for the folder to store all the resulted PNGs for all pages in the document.


For more details on how to work with documents and pages, please refer the screencast.