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How do you draw freehand in LibreOffice Draw? Is there a "pencil tool"? I can see on the left that there's a button to change the "Line Color" and it looks like a pencil, but clicking this doesn't seem to let me draw anything.

Aaron Franke
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2 Answers2

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There is a tool bar down the left side. It includes a "pencil and line" symbol, highlighted in the image below:

enter image description here

The default setting is freehand line, but if you click on the pull-down arrow, you can select other types of lines.

Click on that tool icon. When the cursor is over the workspace, it will change to a crosshair. Position it where you want to start, then click and drag where you want the line. Release the button when you're done.

BTW, if you mess up, you can reselect the line (if it isn't still defined by an object box), and delete it. So you can practice and explore the features and options and then delete it without affecting anything.

fixer1234
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    A very inadequate workaround, it works only once, as soon as you draw a line, it switches back to "pointer" tool - practically, you cannot hand-wrtie not even a single capital "A", because the midle line would deselect the tool :-( – ankostis Mar 30 '22 at 07:48
  • @ankostis, my answer just identifies the feature and how to use it. I didn't design it. – fixer1234 Mar 30 '22 at 07:58
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    @fixer1234 if you *double-click* the tool, it won't switch back. – jmazin Jun 10 '22 at 23:57
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    @jmazin, I've been away from this for quite a while but just loaded my current version of LO and tried double-clicking on the tool. I couldn't replicate the problem. Diagnosing what might be going on with yours isn't practical in a comment thread. This would probably be worth writing a dedicated new question. – fixer1234 Jun 11 '22 at 00:51
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It's much easier to do this in GIMP. It even allows PDFs to be edited, e.g. to sign one's name using the Pencil tool.

ulatekh
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