Drawing Diagrams with Pencil

Mitch — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 10:36:28 +0000

After winning the Extend Firefox 3 contest, I thought it might be worth checking out Pencil to see what all the buzz was about. This add-on for Firefox is an open source tool for creating diagrams and GUI prototyping that everybody can use. As they put it, “With the power of the underlying Mozilla Gecko engine, Pencil turns your excellent Firefox 3 browser into a sketching tool with just a 400-kilobyte installation package”.

Some of the features included are:

Built-in stencils for diagraming and prototyping
Multi-page document with background page
On-screen text editing with rich-text supports
PNG rasterizing
Undo/redo supports

If your a little lost, or just getting started, they also have a great series of tutorials to help you learn a little more:

Working with Shapes – Brief introductions to Pencil functionalities in dealing with shapes to create diagrams.

Working with Documents – Instructions on how to work with documents, pages and export them into rasterized images.

Working with External Objects – Details on the Pencil supports for external images, rich text contents.

If anything Pencil shows you the power of what Firefox can do, with a little creativity. You can learn more about the project at the official web site and pickup the extension on the Firefox Add-ons web site.

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Drawing Diagrams with Pencil