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 External Objects

Screencast: Working-With-ExternalObjects.ogv (2.5 mins, ~13.7 MB, Ogg Theora video)

How can I use the Ogg Theora video format?
Table of contents:
  1. Overview
  2. Inserting External Images
    1. Inserting an Image File
    2. Inserting Image Data
  3. Inserting Rich Texts

Overview

Along with shapes created using stencils that are installed in the Shape Collections pane, external objects including images and rich texts can also be included in a Pencil document.

Pencil supports inserting of external objects into its document in the two most practical ways: copy/paste and drag/drop.

Inserting External Images

Pencil supports two different types of including external images: inserting image file and inserting image data.

Inserting an Image File

To insert an image file:

  1. Open the folder containing the image file using your favorite file manager that support drag and drop.
  2. Drag the file and drop it into the drawing area of a Pencil page.

Pencil supports both rasterized images (PNG, GIF or JPEG) and vector images (SVG.)

Note: When inserting rasterized images, Pencil does not actually embed the file. It simply makes a reference to that file from the document. You should make sure that the file is not deleted or moved as long as you want to use it in the Pencil document. The reference to the file is relative which means that the reference is still valid if you move both the image file and the Pencil document file in a way that their relative difference in path is not changed.

Inserting Image Data

You can also insert an image into Pencil by copying and pasting its data directly into Pencil using the system clipboard. This is normally used in the case you want to transfer an image you are working on in your image data program to Pencil. I usually use this feature by select a region of the image I'm drawing in the GIMP, copy it to the clipboard and paste it into Pencil.

Note: When pasting image data directly into the drawing canvas, Pencil will embed all the image binary data into its document. This help Pencil keeps the document file independent to any of the external image file. This method, however, reduces the Pencil performance dramatically when using with large images. It's recommended that you save your image data into a PNG file and then insert it into Pencil using the first method.

Inserting Rich Texts

Rich-text contents of type text/html can be inserted into Pencil by either drag/drop or copy/paste operations as in the case of images.

After being inserted into a Pencil document, they are converted into a Rich Text shape to allow further modification using the on-screen rich-text editor.

For more details on how to work with external objects, please refer the screencast.