Online Whiteboard & Sketchpad

About the Online Whiteboard & Sketchpad

An infinite canvas for thinking with a pen: drag out rectangles, diamonds and ellipses, join them with arrows that stay attached when you move the shapes, drop sticky notes, draw free-hand, and write text anywhere. Everything can be drawn hand-drawn, sketchy or clean, and the board follows your light or dark theme.

Boards are saved in this browser as you work, so a closed tab does not lose them, and nothing is ever uploaded. Export a PNG or an SVG, or save the board as an **.excalidraw file** — the same plain-JSON format excalidraw.com uses, so you can open your board there (and open .excalidraw and .excalidrawlib files here). There is no collaboration server: sharing is by exported file.

Common uses

• Sketching a flow, an architecture or a user journey while you explain it.
• Wireframing a page or an app screen before designing it.
• Running a retro or a brainstorm with sticky-note columns, then exporting a PNG for the notes.
• Drawing a quick diagram for a document, an issue or a slide.
• Teaching: drawing on a blank board during a lesson, then sharing the SVG.
• Opening an .excalidraw file somebody sent you, without an account.

What the tools do

• Select (1): click, rubber-band or Shift+click; drag to move, use the handles to resize and the one above to rotate (Shift snaps to 15°, Alt resizes around the centre). Alt+drag leaves a copy behind.
• Pan (2) and Space + drag: move the canvas. It is infinite in every direction.
• Rectangle (3), Diamond (4), Ellipse (5): shapes that hold text and that arrows can attach to.
• Arrow (6) and Line (7): straight by default; arrowheads are chosen in the panel.
• Draw (8): free-hand strokes, with pen pressure where the device reports it.
• Text (9): click and type; double-clicking empty canvas also starts text.
• Sticky note (0): a coloured note that grows as you write.
• Eraser (E): drag over elements to remove them (one undo brings them all back).
• Picture (P): add a PNG, JPG, GIF, WebP or SVG from this device. Large pictures are made smaller (longest side 2,400 px) so boards stay small enough to save.

The hand-drawn look

Each shape is drawn twice with slightly bowed lines, ellipses are traced twice around with a wavering radius, and fills can be hachure (parallel strokes), cross-hatch or solid. The wander is worked out from a number stored with each shape, so a shape looks exactly the same every time it is drawn — on screen, in the PNG and in the SVG — and nothing wobbles while you drag it. Clean turns the wobble off for exact geometry; Sketchy doubles it.

The light and the dark board

The board takes the theme you are reading the site in: a white surface, or a dark one. On the dark board new shapes, lines and text are drawn in a light ink, and an ink that would disappear into the surface — the usual near-black on the dark board, a near-white on the white board — is drawn in that board’s ink instead, so a drawing is never invisible. Every other colour stays exactly as you chose it, and a shape’s own outline and text are read against its fill, so a dark outline on a pale box stays dark.

The PNG and SVG exports use the board you see, dark background and all; switch the site to the light theme before exporting if you want a white one. An .excalidraw file records the board colour as well, so it opens the same way here and on excalidraw.com.

Where your boards live

The board you are working on is saved in this browser (IndexedDB) a moment after each change, with its name, a small preview and any pictures you added; the 12 most recent boards are kept and listed under Your boards. They never leave the device, and anyone who uses this browser profile can open them. Clearing the site’s data in your browser (or the entry on /cookies/) deletes them, so download anything you want to keep as an .excalidraw file. Private-browsing windows often allow no storage at all: the board then works normally but is not saved.

Opening and saving Excalidraw files

The .excalidraw format is plain JSON (type, version, source, elements, appState, files), so files move between this tool and excalidraw.com. Opening a file here keeps shapes, lines, arrows and their bindings, free-hand strokes, text, labels inside shapes, sticky notes and embedded pictures; frame, embeddable and iframe elements are counted and left out, and the page says so. Pictures are kept only when the file carries the picture data itself — nothing is ever fetched from another site. A .excalidrawlib library file is added to the board as shapes.

Limitations

• No collaboration: there is no server, so two people cannot draw on the same board at once. Share an exported file instead.
• Rotated shapes resize along their own axes, and a multi-selection that contains rotated elements scales them by the smaller factor to keep their shape.
• Text uses three fonts: a handwriting font bundled with this site and your device’s sans-serif and monospace fonts. An SVG export embeds the handwriting font; PNG exports use whatever is installed.
• Pictures are stored inside the board, so a board with several photographs can become large; the longest side is reduced to 2,400 px when a picture is added.
• Excalidraw features this tool does not have are left out of files it opens: frames, embedded web content, laser pointer, elbowed arrows (kept as straight ones) and curved line editing point by point.
• A PNG export is at most 8,192 pixels on its longest side; export an SVG for anything larger.
• On the dark board the exports are dark too, and ink that would vanish into the surface is drawn in the board’s own ink; the colours stored in the file are the ones you chose.

Privacy

Everything happens in your browser. What you enter or open here is not uploaded or stored by MySmartCoPilot.