Drawing Documents

Drawing documents give you a freeform canvas for sketching, annotating, and visual planning. They’re built for the kind of work that doesn’t fit neatly into rows and columns: hand-drawn maps, dungeon layouts, session planning boards, or annotated images.

The toolbar gives you freehand drawing, shapes, text, sticky notes, and more. You can also place reference markers anywhere on the canvas that link to your other documents, blocks, or calendar dates, turning your drawings into a navigable map of your world.

Getting Around the Canvas

Drawing documents have two primary navigation tools:

• The Hand tool lets you pan around the canvas without accidentally drawing on or selecting anything. It’s active by default when you open a drawing document. While using the Hand tool, you can hover over references to preview them or click them to navigate.
• The Select tool lets you click on elements to select, move, resize, and edit them. When you have an element selected, the style panel appears with options for that element such as color, size, or reference icon.

You can also navigate the canvas using:

• Scroll to pan up and down
• Shift+Scroll to pan left and right
• Pinch or Ctrl+Scroll to zoom in and out
• Zoom ranges from 5% all the way to 800%, so you can pull back for a birds-eye view or zoom in tight on fine details

Drawing and Shapes

The toolbar along the left side gives you access to all the drawing and shape tools:

• Draw for freehand sketching, Highlight for marking up areas with a translucent stroke, and Eraser for removing strokes and shapes
• Shape tools including rectangle, ellipse, triangle, diamond, hexagon, oval, rhombus, star, cloud, x-box, and checkbox
• Arrow and Line tools for connecting elements or drawing straight lines, with directional arrow variants (up, down, left, right)
• Text for placing text directly on the canvas and Note for sticky notes
• Frame for drawing a named frame around a group of elements, useful for organizing sections of a larger canvas

References

Drawing documents have their own way of working with references. Instead of inline text links, you place interactive markers directly on the canvas that link to other documents, blocks, or calendar dates. Imagine pinning location markers across a world map, each one linking to the relevant session notes, NPC descriptions, or dungeon documents.

To place a reference, press P or select Insert Reference from the toolbar, then click anywhere on the canvas. A search menu will appear where you can find and select the content you want to link to. The menu searches both document titles and text within your documents as you type. If nothing matches, you can create a new document right from the search menu. For calendar documents, a date picker will appear after you select the calendar so you can choose the exact date.

Once placed, using the Hand tool you can hover over a reference marker to see a preview of its linked content, or click it to navigate directly to the linked document, block, or calendar date.

Reference Icon Styles

Each reference marker displays an icon to help you visually categorize your markers. Several icon styles are available.

You can change the icon style prior to creating a reference while the reference tool is active, or after placing a reference by selecting it with the Select tool.

When you zoom out, nearby reference markers automatically group together into a cluster showing a count of how many markers it contains. This helps keep your drawing documents uncluttered, especially when you have a large number of references.

Images

You can add images to your canvas by dragging and dropping them directly onto it, or by pasting from your clipboard. Supported formats are JPEG and PNG, with a maximum file size of 25 MB per image.

Once an image is on the canvas, you can resize it by dragging its edges.

Grid

Drawing documents can show a grid (if enabled) to help you align shapes and elements. Grid lines adapt to your current zoom level, showing more detail as you zoom in.

You can toggle the grid on or off from the menu at Menu > Preferences > Grid.

Menu and Preferences

The main menu in the top left gives you access to several submenus:

• Edit for undo and redo
• View for view options
• Export for exporting your canvas as an image
• Preferences with toggles for:
  • Snap Mode to snap elements to the grid
  • Grid to show or hide grid lines
  • Wrap Mode for text wrapping behavior
  • Edge Scrolling to scroll the canvas when dragging near the edges
  • Reduce Motion to limit animations

Collaboration

Drawing documents support real-time collaboration. When others are editing the same drawing, you’ll see their cursors moving on the canvas as they work. Changes sync automatically so everyone stays up to date.

For details on inviting others and managing access, see Sharing Documents.

Keyboard Shortcuts

For a complete list of all keyboard shortcuts, see Keyboard Shortcuts.