19A clean image
Everything that leaves Slate leaves from one panel, split in two. Picture gives you a still — PNG, JPG or WebP — or something that plays — GIF, APNG or animated WebP — of this board or of every board in one go. Film gives you a video of the board drawing itself, with any narration, cropped to the board so no wooden surround travels with it.
Find itThe Export / Share button.
Use itPick a still — PNG (lossless), JPG (smaller) or WebP (smaller again) — or one that plays — GIF, APNG or animated WebP — then This board or All boards — all boards writes one file each, named for the board. Choose 1×, 2× or 3× resolution (and JPG quality), then Download, Share, Copy, or Print. A GIF is built from the board’s beats, so set those in the beats manager first — merge the ones that should appear together and they arrive as one frame. The panel tells you how many there are and warns you if there are too many to encode. All boards writes one GIF per board, each with that board’s own beats. Trim has three settings: Off prints on a normal sheet with a margin; Board area makes the sheet the board’s own shape — no page border, no white margin around the board; What’s drawn also crops the empty surface away, so a small diagram arrives its own size instead of as a page of blank board. Trim applies to downloads, sharing and printing alike.
Which stillPNG is lossless and the safe default — every device opens it, and it is what Copy and Share use. JPG is much smaller but cannot hold transparency and softens fine writing slightly. WebP is the middle road: roughly a third of the PNG for the same picture, with transparency intact, and it opens in every current browser, Word, PowerPoint and Google Docs — but some older desktop software and a few school projectors still do not know it, so send a PNG if you are not sure what will open it. All three take the same resolution, Trim and This board / All boards settings, and WebP gets the same Quality dial as JPG.
Which one that playsAll three build the same replay — one frame per beat, in the order you drew them, with a longer pause on the last — and differ only in the file you get. GIF is the one that plays anywhere, including inside a slide deck or an old LMS, but it is limited to 256 colours and cannot be part-transparent, so the corners around the board come out black. APNG keeps full colour and transparency and looks exactly like the board; it is a PNG, so anything that cannot animate it still shows the first frame rather than nothing. Animated WebP is far the smallest — on a three-beat board it came out at 12 KB against 203 KB for the GIF and 664 KB for the APNG — with full colour and transparency, and it plays in every current browser. Choose GIF to paste somewhere old, animated WebP for the web or for messaging, APNG when you want a lossless copy.
Speed, and how smoothAn animation is drawn, not stepped: the replay is sampled about 25 times a second, so a stroke grows across the frames the way it does on screen rather than appearing whole. Animation speed slides from 0.25× to 8× and really changes the file — a faster setting covers the same drawing in fewer frames and a shorter running time, and the pause on the last frame shortens with it.
Beats, and how many framesThe beats still set the order and the captions, so set them in the beats manager first. They no longer set the frames. APNG and animated WebP get up to 240 frames and spend them on smoothness; only the changed part of each frame is stored, which is why a 70-frame APNG is a few hundred kilobytes rather than many megabytes. GIF has 40 — it quantises every frame to 256 colours and encodes in background workers, which is where a tablet struggles — so it spreads those 40 across the whole replay and is the least smooth of the three. A board with more than 40 beats is still refused for GIF; use APNG there. All boards writes one file per board, each with that board’s own beats. Resolution steps aside for these, because an animation is sized by its own frame width rather than by you. Trim stays put whatever format is chosen, because Trim also shapes what you print — so you never have to switch to PNG and back just to set a trim for printing. The panel says which of the two an animation ignores.
Every picture keeps its frameA cropped picture used to arrive as a bare rectangle of surface, because cropping cuts inside the board and the frame is outside the cut. Now the board’s own frame goes back around the crop — its colours, its thickness, its corner radius — so What’s drawn, and a region saved from Region, both come out looking like a small Slate board rather than a screenshot with a ragged edge. Because the frame adds the same thickness on all four sides, a cropped picture is a little larger than the crop itself.
Transparency, honestlyWebP, APNG and animated WebP all carry an alpha channel, and Slate never flattens it. What that gets you in practice is the rounded corners around the board, which stay clear instead of being filled in — where a GIF blacks them and a JPG whitens them. The board itself is not transparent: a still picture is deliberately backed with the frame’s own colour so it cannot arrive as a dark wedge on a light page, and that has not changed.
If a format is missingWriting a WebP needs the browser’s own encoder. Where there is not one — some older iPads and older desktop browsers — the two WebP buttons simply are not shown, and the rest of the panel is exactly as it always was. The APNG and animated WebP writers are fetched the first time you ask for one, not when Slate starts, and then stored for offline use, so they cost nothing until you want them and work with no connection afterwards.
FilmVideo records the whole lesson in real time, at the board’s own size. With a narration it plays the deck exactly as you told it, board by board, with your voice over the top; without one it plays each board’s beats in turn into one file. YouTube is the same film fitted into a 1080p frame, ready to upload. Both are the board area only, and both come out as MP4 where your browser can make one — WebM otherwise. The toast says which you got. A film plays in real time as it records, so a five-minute lesson takes five minutes — tap the progress card or press Esc to stop early.
Print a deckWith more than one board, Print board(s)… offers all boards, just this one, or a range — pick a from and to board by name. Choose all and the whole deck prints as a single document — one board per page, centred and scaled to fit the sheet, in deck order. A single-board deck prints straight away with no question asked.
Save as PDFExport → PDF opens the print window ready to Save as PDF, using the same choice of boards and area as Print. The action register, spot-question gallery and student photos print the same way, inside the page — no pop-up window, so a pop-up blocker never stops them.
Paper & inkWith a Trim on, Slate asks your printer for a sheet the board’s own shape and no margins, so the board fills the paper with nothing wasted — that is what “Board area” means. A printer that cannot make that size substitutes its own paper, and then the board is fitted and centred on it rather than pinned to the top. A board much wider than a sheet leaves white whichever way it is turned — a board three times wider than tall covers under half of A4 at best — so when you print several boards with a Trim on, Slate stacks them on one sheet, as many as bring the sheet closest to ordinary paper, and asks for that shape instead. Two wide boards stacked all but fill a landscape A4, and you get half as many sheets. A board already close to page-shaped keeps one per sheet as before. Slate turns the sheet to match your boards, so a wide board fills the page instead of sitting as a thin strip. Safari takes its orientation from the print dialog rather than from Slate, so on iPad choose Landscape there. Printing a long deck of dark boards uses a great deal of toner — for a handout, a white or light surface is far kinder to the printer. And because the dialog offers Save as PDF, this is also the quickest way to turn a whole deck into one PDF.
Part of the Slate guide — or read the whole guide on one page.