Drawing and highlighting

Draw anywhere on a board with the Pen, mark over things with the Highlighter, and rub strokes out with the Eraser. All three are in the Drawing bar, which rises above the toolbox while one of them is on.

Start drawing

Click the drawing tool in the toolbox, right after Shapes and connectors. It shows the tool you used last, the Pen at first. Or press a key:

Tool	Key
Pen	`PP`
Highlighter	`⇧PShift`+`P`
Eraser	`EE`

Then press and drag on the board. The Pen and the Highlighter draw over notes and other things too. The tool stays on until you choose another, or press EscEsc to go back to Select.

The Drawing bar

The bar holds, left to right:

The three tools: Pen, Highlighter and Eraser. Click one to switch to it. It then takes the drawing tool’s place in the toolbox.
Colours, for the Pen and the Highlighter. The one in use has a ring around it.
Sizes: Fine, Medium and Bold.

The Eraser has no colours or sizes.

	Colours	Fine, Medium, Bold	Starts as
Pen	Ink, Gray, Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple	2, 4 and 8 pixels	Ink, Medium
Highlighter	Gray, Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple	8, 16 and 24 pixels	Yellow, Medium

Ink is the same colour as the text, dark in the light theme and light in the dark one. The Highlighter’s colours are see-through, so what is under them still shows.

The Pen and the Highlighter each keep their own colour and size on every board, until you quit Bloomingo. A small dot on the toolbox’s drawing tool shows the colour it will draw in.

Draw with the Pen

The pointer becomes a crosshair. Each stroke shows as you draw and stays exactly where you lift.

Strokes close together become one drawing. A stroke that comes near a drawing you made since you chose the Pen joins it. That way a word or a sketch is one thing, which you can move, resize or delete as one.

With a pen that senses pressure, the line gets thinner or thicker as you press, from half to one and a half times its size. Each stroke is one change, so ⌘ZCtrl+Z takes back the last one.

Mark things with the Highlighter

The Highlighter draws a wide, see-through mark of the same width all along, however you press. It draws over whatever it crosses, so you can mark up a screenshot or a page of a PDF. Its strokes join each other into one drawing, as the Pen’s do.

Rub out with the Eraser

Press and drag. Every stroke the Eraser passes over fades, Pen or Highlighter alike, and is gone when you let go. The pointer is a small circle.

It takes away whole strokes, not parts of them.
Everything rubbed out in one drag comes back with one ⌘ZCtrl+Z.
A drawing with no strokes left goes from the board. One with fewer strokes shrinks to fit them.

Move, resize and colour a drawing

With Select on, click on the ink of a drawing to select it. The empty space between its strokes stays free, so you can still click what lies under it. Once it is selected, drag from anywhere in its box to move it.

Resize: drag a corner. A drawing keeps its shape. Hold ⇧Shift to stretch it.
Colour: in the actions bar, a colour turns every stroke that colour. No colour gives each stroke its own colour back.
Duplicate, copy and remove work as they do for anything else. See Selecting and moving.

A drawing can’t have links. A double-click on its ink adds nothing to the board.

On a tablet, the pen and your fingers work differently. See Tablets.