01Drawing
Four ways to make a mark, down the left rail. The Pen is pressure-aware — lean in with a stylus for a heavier line. The Pencil is softer and grainier. The Highlighter lays down translucent colour you can draw over, with its own opacity. The Eraser lifts strokes cleanly away.
Find itThe tool rail — Pen Pencil Highlighter Eraser. Colour, size and (for the highlighter) opacity live in the style bar.
Use itPick a tool and draw. Press harder with a stylus for a thicker line; your resting palm is ignored. Set highlighter opacity from 10–60%, and the eraser as fine or as broad as you like.
Performance settingsIf Slate feels slow on a particular device, Tools → Options → Performance tunes it. (The same panel’s Drawing tab holds the pen options.) Pick one of three presets: Best quality (how Slate always ran — the default), Balanced (lighter drawing that looks the same), or Battery saver (smoothest on older laptops and cheap tablets). Advanced lets you set each part yourself: drawing resolution, ink detail, a simpler pencil, animations, undo steps, live collaboration updates and the frosted-glass panels. The panel may suggest a preset if the device reports little memory or a low battery.
Pen responsivenessTwo switches at the top of Options → Performance make the pen feel quicker, and neither makes anything look worse. Draw ahead of the pen is on by default where your browser can do it. Low-latency ink is off until you try it, and starts working the next time you open Slate.
Explained simplyDraw ahead of the pen: Slate always draws a tiny bit behind your pen, like a shadow running to keep up. This makes Slate guess where your pen is going next and draw there early, so the line keeps up with you. If it guesses wrong, the real line fixes it straight away — the guess is never saved. Low-latency ink: normally your ink waits for the screen’s next refresh before it appears, like waiting for the next bus. This lets it jump on right away. On a few computers it can make the screen flicker, which is why it is off until you try it. Drawing resolution: how many tiny dots make up the picture — more dots are sharper but more work. Ink detail: how many little points make up each line. Undo steps: how many times you can go back; each one is a saved copy of the board. Frosted glass: the blurry see-through look behind menus, which is hard work for slower computers. Best quality, Balanced, Battery saver: three ready-made mixes of all the settings — Best quality makes everything as sharp and smooth as it can be, Battery saver does a little less work so an older device keeps up and the battery lasts longer. Pencil: textured makes it grainy like real graphite; simple is a plain line, which is faster. Animations: things sliding and bouncing into place; reduced makes them just appear. Live collab updates: how often your moves are sent to people watching — economy sends fewer, which helps on slow internet. None of these change your boards, only how they are drawn on the device you are using.
Which browsersDraw-ahead works in Chrome and Edge. Safari and iPad do not offer it yet, so there the switch is greyed out rather than doing nothing. Low-latency ink works in Chrome and Edge on most computers. The panel tells you exactly what is working on the device you are using.
What changes, and what does notThese settings only change how boards are drawn on this device. Your work is never altered, and a board looks the same when opened elsewhere. Drawing resolution is the biggest lever: canvas work grows with the square of it, so 1× draws nine times fewer pixels than 3×. Lowering undo steps frees the memory straight away. Settings are remembered on each device separately.
ContainersSelect anything — box or lasso — and press Shrink in the selection toolbar. Those objects move into a container of their own and leave a small marker behind, freeing the space for more writing. Double-tap the marker to open the container full screen; it is a real board, so every tool works inside it exactly as normal. Back to board returns you. Name a container with the label button so the marker says what is inside, and give it a colour with the palette button so several containers are easy to tell apart — each new one already starts in a different colour. One board can hold as many as you like. Drag a marker's corner handle to make it bigger or smaller.
Containers in a replayA replay shows the lesson as it happened, not just the board as it ends up. The marks that went into a container are written in their true place in the sequence, then draw together into the marker at the moment you shrank them — so nothing a class saw is missing from the replay. This works for ordinary replays and for recorded narration: shrink during a recording and the take shows it happening. Containers open once a recording is finished, since a recording follows one board.
Recovered containersTwo earlier builds saved a container's contents but not the marker that points to it. Open a file from then and any such container comes back automatically as a marker called Recovered, top left of the board, with everything inside intact. Rename, recolour or move it like any other.
Selecting over locked workLocked items act as part of the background. A box or lasso drag can start right on top of them and picks up only the unlocked work — so writing laid over a locked worksheet can be gathered up and moved as a group. Once a group is selected, press anywhere inside its dashed outline to move it, even in the gaps between letters. A plain tap on a locked item still selects it, so it can be unlocked.
Paste textCopy text from anywhere — a web page, a document, an email — and paste it straight onto the board (Ctrl/⌘+V). It lands as a text object in the middle of what you can see, in your current colour and font, wrapped to a comfortable width; no need to make a text box first. Things you copied inside Slate still paste as themselves.
Paste as pictureThe other way to paste. Right-click an empty part of the board (or long-press on a tablet) and the menu offers Paste here and Paste as picture. Where the ordinary paste gives you something editable — text you can retype, Slate marks you can pull apart — this gives you one picture of the same content, and only that.
Which one to useUse the ordinary paste when you will keep working on the content: correcting the words, recolouring the marks, moving one piece of it. Use Paste as picture when the content is finished and you want it to stay exactly as it looks — a formatted table from a web page that would lose its layout as plain text, a worked example you want to place as one thing rather than a dozen strokes, a screenshot of a spreadsheet, or a set of your own marks you would rather not nudge out of alignment by accident. It is also the answer when a paste arrives looking wrong: a picture of it always looks right.
What it can turn into a pictureA picture on the clipboard (placed as it is, at its own size). Formatted content copied from a page or a document — headings, colours, tables — rendered by the browser itself. Plain text, drawn in your current colour and font, wrapped as a paste would wrap it. And your own Slate marks, if you copied them here first, flattened into one picture. Empty, transparent edges are trimmed off automatically, so a diagram on a big clear canvas arrives its own size instead of surrounded by nothing.
It is one object, not manyThe result is a single Slate picture — exactly the same kind of object as any image you add or drop in. It moves, resizes, rotates, crops, duplicates and deletes like one, and the image lab opens on it for cleaning up or adjusting. What it is not is separate editable pieces: the words in it are no longer text you can retype, and marks in it are no longer strokes you can recolour. If you want those back, paste the ordinary way instead — the original is still on your clipboard.
When it cannotTurning formatted content into a picture uses the browser's own renderer, and two things are beyond it: pictures inside that content which live on another website do not load, and some browsers will not draw formatted content onto a canvas at all. Where either happens Slate quietly falls back to drawing the text instead, so you still get a picture. Reading the clipboard from a menu also needs the browser's permission — where it is refused (Firefox, and older Safari) Slate says so and suggests copying inside Slate or using ⌘V. Nothing is ever pasted silently wrong: if there is nothing it can use, it tells you.
Box or LassoWith Select & move in hand, the style bar offers two ways to select: Box drags a rectangle, Lasso draws a freehand loop around exactly what you want. A lasso picks up anything whose centre falls inside the loop, so it will not sweep up things it only brushes past.
Containers and printingA container prints as just its marker — the point of shrinking is to clear the page as well as the screen. If you want the contents too, tick Print containers as extra pages in Export; each one is added as its own page after the boards. Containers are not deck pages: they never appear in the board strip and never change your board count.
AmbienceUnder Presentation → Options → Ambience, the area around the board can become a Night sky, Water, Sparks or Waves — the board itself stays exactly as it is, lit in the middle of a darkened room. It is drawn outside the board, so it sets the room and does not appear in a film of the board. The scene takes its colours from whatever theme you are using, so it blends with a chalkboard as readily as a light paper skin. Whatever you pick stays picked for next time.
When the room stirsBy default ambience appears in shows only. Tools → Options → Room offers three others: Off for never, On the board to have it running while you work as well, and When idle — which leaves the board still while you are using it and lets the room stir only after about a minute and a half with nothing touched, settling again the instant you draw, type or move the mouse. Idle is the gentle one: a board left up between lessons comes alive rather than sitting dead. On the board it is drawn at a lower frame rate than in a show, and it stops altogether when you switch tabs, when your device asks for reduced motion, or when the board is filling the screen with no room left around it — and in that last case the note under the choices says so, rather than leaving you wondering why nothing happened. The choice is yours, not the file’s — it follows you between slates rather than travelling inside one.
Playing a board in the showA board does not have to arrive finished. Under Presentation → Options → Playback choose Whole — the board is simply there, as it always was — or Beats, where the board arrives empty and each tap of the right arrow, or of Play, reveals the next beat. Set the speed before the lesson, and turn beat captions on if you want each beat titled on screen. In Beats the arrow keys step through the board first and then carry on to the next one, so you never change hands. Draw on the board at any point and the rest of it appears at once, ready to annotate — the board stays live throughout. Containers play the same way.
Presenter modeTap Presentation in the top bar, then Show, to run your deck full screen. The top bar steps aside, and the presenter bar takes the free space at the top so its menus open downwards. The tool rail stays and the pen and pencil controls dock just under the board rather than on its edge, because annotating while you teach is the point. Move with the arrows on the bar or the left and right arrow keys. On the bar: Play replays the board you are on, and Curtain, Spot, Laser and Calc turn each one on and off with a single tap and light up while they are on; Options opens the full Presentation menu for their settings, where curtain, spotlight and laser now sit together under Pointer options. Set those before the show and the taps are all you need during it. Tap a container marker once to open it, whatever tool you are holding — a Back to board button then appears on the bar, so the way out is always on screen; Esc and the arrow keys do the same thing. A container plays like any other board. Finish or Esc ends the show, and turns the laser and any curtain or spotlight off as it goes.
Keep or put backIf you drew on the boards during a show, Slate asks at the end whether to keep the annotations or put the boards back exactly as they were. The whole deck is copied when the show starts, so putting it back is complete. Presenter mode is not offered during a live session — everyone in the room already sees your board. Full screen is part of presenter mode, so it is not offered either; the things a live session needs — the curtain, the spotlight, the laser, eyes-up and the timer — all reach the class on their own.
Alignment, nudging and selectingA text box can be left, centred, right or justified from the text style bar. Arrow keys nudge whatever is selected by a pixel, or ten with Shift, for lining things up exactly. Shift+click adds to a selection, Ctrl/⌘+A selects everything on the board (locked work excepted), and Ctrl/⌘+X cuts — so you can cut on one board and paste on another.
Set a text columnSelect a text object and you will see a short bar on its right edge, unlike the square corner handles. The corners scale the letters; that bar sets the column — the width the words wrap to and the width they align inside. Drag it out and a long caption folds into a tidy block; centre the text and it centres within that column rather than jumping anywhere. Leave it alone and there is no column: the text is only as wide as its longest line, so centring simply balances the lines against each other and the block stays where you put it. A long line still never runs off the board, column or no column.
Six ways to eraseWith the eraser in hand, the style bar offers six modes. Rub is the original: it takes out exactly what you pass over. Colour erases one colour only: pick the colour from the swatches, from ▾ More colours, or with the dropper by tapping a mark of that colour on the board — then rub over the board, and only marks in that colour go. Red corrections come out while blue workings stay. Pen, pencil, highlighter and brush marks are rubbed out where you pass; shapes, lines and text in that colour go whole when touched; pictures are never affected. Stroke removes any whole mark the eraser touches, in one piece — handy for a wrong word without rubbing at it. Box, Circle and Lasso clear an area: drag a rectangle, drag an oval, or draw a loop. The three area erasers work just like rubbing — a line running through the area loses the part inside and keeps both ends, and pictures and notes are rubbed out where the area covers them. A red outline shows the area before you let go. Locked items and container markers are never erased, and Undo brings back anything removed.
Eraser presetsLike the pen, the eraser can keep up to five saved sizes. Pick the eraser, set a size, and press + in the style bar; each preset shows as a ring the size of the mark it leaves. Choosing one only changes the eraser — never the colour your pen goes back to.
Straighten lines automaticallyTurn it on in Tools → Options → Drawing. When you lift the pen, a stroke that is nearly straight snaps to a perfectly straight line — and if its angle is close to level, upright or a true diagonal it snaps exactly to that, turning about its middle, so a line meant to be level really is level rather than merely straight. Anything clearly at its own angle, and short marks like ticks and letters, are left exactly as you drew them. Choose how nearly straight a line must be, and which of pen, pencil and highlighter it applies to. Undo brings back the hand-drawn line.
Dot pointerIn the same panel: instead of a picture of the tool sitting beside the tip, show a dot the size of the mark, right where it will land, in the colour you are drawing with. It makes it easy to see exactly where a stroke will start and how thick it will be. Applies to pen, pencil and highlighter.
Presets at a glanceSaved pen and pencil presets show as a dot of their own colour and thickness, and highlighter presets as a small rectangle the shape of the highlighter tip — the way PowerPoint shows its pens.
Highlight shapesThe highlighter can lay down a shape instead of a free stroke. The shape button in the style bar opens a picker with Free, Rect, Square, Ellipse and Circle — each one tap, no cycling through to reach the one you want. Square and Circle hold equal sides on their own, so you do not have to remember to hold Shift.
StylusWorks with Apple Pencil, Wacom and your finger — pressure and palm-rejection are automatic.
Part of the Slate guide — or read the whole guide on one page.