Just wondering - I rarely use the pencil tool but for some things it could be really useful - if there was some user control over it. It seems to draw a trace of what you want and then when you stop drawing it converts the trace to a weird collection of rounded curves and joined lines - sometimes a straight line that just extends for several inches that wasn’t anywhere near the original drawing.
Are there any secret keyboard controls to allow precise drawing with this tool? In terms of bezier curves.. I don’t want any.. I just want some fine control over the radius of segments and turns etc.
The issue you mention has been previously reported, and it is in our backlog of things to fix!
We’d love to know more about that what kind of tool, and use cases, you’d like to see be added to the Pen Tool in the future. The more explicit and detailed you can be, the better, since this helps us share and create a narrative to share with our team.
I found a workaround - which was to use GIMP - the free open source paint editor. But, it would be great if Sketch supported some of the basic things so I don’t have to leave and copy back and forth.
I needed to simulate a scatterplot of colored dots and scatterlines. To get the right colors, the easiest thing to do was to separate out the bitmaps by color in GIMP - and apply color styles to the separated bitmaps in Sketch.
So the tool that was essential for this was the ‘magic wand’ (fuzzy selector or ‘select by color’ - which is what did the trick. THe bitmaps are fuzzy colors of many shades per color - so it was a matter of ‘click selecting by color and shift click to select all the related shades. Once complete you copy the selection into Sketch and apply color styles using the color adjust settings.
THe current magic wand in Sketch couldn’t do this. What I needed was:
‘click selecting by color and shift click to select all the related shades to seperate out the parts of the bitmap by color that I needed.
I originally tried the pencil and vector tools in Sketch but they were just not able to draw the effect to simulate these images. The problem with the pen tool was that drawing many points close together tends to join them as soon they are close together. THe pecil tool makes up it’s own lines based on your drawing whith weird rounded and curved lines that were not intended.. just need a paintbrush tool with varying widths and effects.
