Freehand

A closed shape traced by dragging its outline.

The Freehand traces a closed shape from a single drag. It suits a boundary that no number of straight segments follows cleanly: a pour that curves, a stripped area, a hand-drawn limit on a scanned sheet.

Draw it: press where the outline starts, drag along the boundary, release. The shape closes back to the starting point on release, so the last stretch does not have to be traced. The cursor is a circle sized to the stroke.

Settings

• Thickness: 0 to 20, default 1. Outline weight.
• Colour: the outline. Default red.
• Fill: a second colour channel, empty by default.
• Opacity: applies to outline and fill together.

Editing afterwards

Selecting a freehand shape gives the standard box: move, rotate, and drag a handle to resize the whole outline together. It does not offer per-vertex handles, even though what it stores is a vertex list: a traced outline has far too many vertices for one-at-a-time editing to be the useful gesture. Where you need to move individual corners, draw it with Polygon instead.

Notes

• Freehand lives in Shapes, not Draw, because it produces an enclosed shape with a fill. The Draw group's ink tools leave an open stroke that is never closed and never filled.
• The path is smoothed at commit and the smoothed vertex list is what is stored, so reopening the project gives the smoothed shape rather than the raw mouse path. It saves as a PDF polygon, which is what a closed vertex path is.