Drawing and text¶

Libraries cover most things, but sometimes you need to draw the thing yourself, or just write on the page.

Pencil and Marker¶

Pencil (P) draws a smoothed freehand line. Marker (M) lays down ink like an art marker: a little see-through, slightly uneven, darker at the edges and where the tip rests. Draw over the same spot twice and it deepens.

Each has a small chevron on its palette button. Click it for Line Weight — 1 to 100 points. Pencil defaults to 1, Marker to 10.

Marker also has a Tip:

The tip belongs to the stroke, so changing it only affects what you draw next.

Each stroke you draw becomes its own object. It isn't selected when you finish it, so you can keep drawing; switch to Select to move, resize or restyle it afterwards.

Pencil takes the stroke texture you've chosen. Marker doesn't, because ink has its own surface. If you want a broad textured line, select a finished marker stroke and give it a texture: the texture replaces the ink. Remove the texture and the ink comes back.

Three settings in Settings › Marker turn the grain, the darker edges and the pooling off, for every marker stroke on your Mac. They change how strokes are drawn, not your diagrams. If a diagram with lots of big marker scribbles feels slow, turn the grain off.

Polyshape¶

Polyshape (G) builds a shape point by point, which is how you get an outline that's exactly the outline you wanted.

• Click to drop a corner point.
• Alt-click to drop a curve point instead.
• Click near the first point (once you have three or more) to close the shape.
• Double-click, or press Enter, to finish an open path.
• Esc abandons it.

A closed polyshape can be added straight to a shape library — see Your own libraries.

Editing points¶

Anything made of points — polyshapes, pencil and marker strokes, converted SVGs — can be reshaped afterwards.

Select it and press Enter, or double-click it, or right-click and choose Edit Points.

Rectangles and ellipses¶

Two shapes have keyboard shortcuts but no palette button:

• Rectangle — R
• Ellipse — O

Click to place one at a default size, or drag out the frame you want.

Notes, from sticky notes to tags, come from Notes and Cards in the Library panel. See Notes and cards.

Text¶

Free-floating text¶

Press T and click for a text box at the default size, or drag to set its size. The editor opens immediately. To edit existing free-floating text, use Select and double-click it, or select it and press Enter.

Drag anywhere inside the text box to move it. While editing, dragging inside selects text; use the outer border to move the box. Use its usual handles to resize or rotate it, including while typing. There is no separate inner text area to enter or resize. Starting a move, resize or rotation finishes the current text edit; Undo reverses the transform first, then the text edit.

Labels on shapes¶

Double-click any shape to type a label on it. Double-click a connector to label the line. This is usually what you want — the text belongs to the shape and travels with it.

While you're editing a shape label, you can drag the border to move the text area, drag a corner to resize it, or use the round handle to rotate just the text.

A label can go anywhere that still touches its shape: inside, above, below, off to either side. Drag it past an edge and it follows you until only its own edge is still touching, then it stops. It won't wander off on its own.

Text Position in the Shape Properties panel is the quick way to put it somewhere standard. Top, Middle and Bottom set the text inside its area; Above Shape and Below Shape put it just outside. Then, if you like, drag it from there to anywhere that still touches. Once you've dragged it, Text Position shows Middle, because the label is now wherever you put it. Choose a position again to snap it back.

Clicking a label is clicking its shape, even when the label sits outside it: one click selects the shape. For an ordinary shape, a double-click on its label edits it.

Editing keys¶

Formatting text¶

Formatting goes where you'd expect on a Mac:

• While you're typing, it styles just the words you've selected, so you can make one word bold, the first line bigger or a phrase highlighted. Alignment applies to each paragraph your selection touches. With nothing selected, the style goes on what you type next.
• When a shape is selected and you're not typing, it styles the shape's whole label.

Every text works this way: shape labels, text boxes, connector labels, container and callout titles, lane titles, table cells and the labels in the parts of complex shapes such as a Ring or a Flow. Every text control in the Shape Properties panel (Cmd+Alt+4) works this way too, including the Font Size box and the text colour's hex and colour fields: click one while you're typing, enter a value and press Enter, and the selected words change and you carry on typing.

While you type in a shape, its words sit on white so you can read them on any fill, and they keep their colours and highlights. A colour too pale to read on white shows in black until you finish typing. A text box has no white behind it: the page shows through.

A highlight is a colour behind the words, like a highlighter pen, and it shows in exported bitmap images, PDFs, SVG files and prints. To put a colour behind a whole label, select the shape and choose a highlight: it covers every word. There's no separate text background any more; backgrounds from diagrams made with earlier versions aren't shown.

Copy Style and Paste Style in the Edit menu (Cmd+Alt+C and Cmd+Alt+V) also follow what you're doing. While you're typing they copy the style of the first selected word, with its paragraph's alignment, and paste it onto the selected words. When shapes are selected they copy and paste a shape's fill, line and line weight. Paste Style pastes the last style you copied, so a text style pastes only while you're typing and a shape's style only onto shapes.

Strikethrough, links, subscript and superscript, line spacing, lists and tab stops aren't available in diagram text.

The Shape Properties panel's Text section:

• On the first line, Font Family — the menu next to the Aa icon: System Font plus everything installed on your Mac — and Font Size: pick from the list or type a number; there are buttons to step it up and down. A font the diagram uses but your Mac doesn't have shows as "(Not Installed)": the text keeps that font and shows in the system font until you install it
• On the second line, Text colour (the A chip), the highlighter chip, the Alignment buttons and Bold / Italic / Underline
• Text position, the last button in the section. For free-floating text, choose Top, Middle or Bottom to align the text within its own box. Shape labels also offer Above Shape and Below Shape. If your selection includes free-floating text, only the three inside positions appear, and your choice applies to all selected objects that contain text. The icon shows the current position; different positions show a dashed box until you choose one for them all.

That last one is more useful than it sounds. Putting a label below a symbol instead of across it is often the difference between a readable diagram and a mess.