A digital, vectorial and infinite chalkboard.
Pizarra is a desktop application for free-hand drawing. It is designed for making live explanations, complex diagrams and eventually presentations.
The user interface is clean to maximize the drawing surface on screeen and the tooling minimal to keep it simple.
You have in front of your eyes an infinite canvas in every direction, including inwards and outwards zoom (ok, there might be a technical limit for it). There are also some basic drawing tools:
Aditionally you can adjust the thickness and transparency of the pen.
Shift
to rotate it.
The format in use for saving and opening files is SVG. It is an standard image format for vector drawing compatible with the web. From this format I use an unspecified subset (It tends to grow very little in some pizarra versions).
More precisely this is what happens: if a file was created with Pizarra it will be opened with any later version and any other SVG-compatible software. If a file was created with any other program opening it with pizarra is undefined behavior. I can't promise it will work.
Aditionally there is the possibility of exporting your drawing as
PNG
image. This files, however, cannot be opened with Pizarra
again. Exporting files is meant to share the view of a drawing in
platforms not compatible with vector images (like social networks).
L | Switch to the pen |
R | Switch to the rectangle |
P | Switch to the polygon |
C | Switch to the circle (from center and radius) |
K | Switch to the circle (from three points) |
E | Switch to the ellipse |
G | Switch to the eraser |
Q | Switch to the grid |
Alt + Q | Switch to the free grid |
+ | Zoom in |
- | Zoom out |
0 | Go back to the original zoom |
Alt + C | Change color |
Ctrl + S | Save as SVG |
Ctrl + Shift + E | Export as PNG |
Ctrl + Z | Undo last action |
Ctrl + Shift + Z | Undo last undo |
If you like making drawings to accompany your explanations for other people or yourself, this might be the right tool.
The motivation behind its creation was the need to have a clean interface with mostly canvas where I could make diagrams and complex explanations. Like in a chalkboard but for the computer and of infinite size.
And of course to take advantaje of my wacom tablet. Although in a touchscreen it is just as useful.
Me too! The easiest way is using the AUR packages, either the binary (pizarra-bin
) or compiling from scratch (pizarra-git
).
If you use Manjaro Linux you can use Add/Remove software program searching for Pizarra (If you can't find it you might need to enable AUR support in the settings).
Awesome, A package for that platform just came out of the oven. Search for the latest version in the download list
No problem, chances are you can download the binary for the latest version and run it without problems.
I made an installer for you! And let me tell you it wass a PITA. It works for 64-bit windows.
Download the last version, See all the downloads or learn how to build it yourself.
Ok, this is the deal: I don't have myself a mac, therefore I cannot build the installer. So unless someone does this for me you have to build pizarra yourself. Don't worry, is not that difficult, it's a matter of doing these things:
And doing the following:
# Install the required packages for the installation
brew install gtk+3 adwaita-icon-theme
# Clone the repository
git clone https://gitlab.com/categulario/pizarra-gtk.git
# compile and run
cd pizarra-gtk
cargo run --release
I have trustworthy information that this works. If you try it don't hesitate to write to me so I can extend this information.
You certainly don't have to. So here is the source code in case
you want to compile from scratch. It can be done from any Linux or windows
and in case you need a hand I'm here to help (find me on mastodon or
twitter as categulario
).
During development I've found (and I've been told of) other software with similar purpose. Here is the list.
C++/Qt
.
C++/Gtk
.
Rust+Gtk
.
Qt.