pixie & pavel

Pixie Space

Changelog

What shipped, when. Pixie Space is built in the open. New releases announced here; patches collected under the nearest minor.

Latest

0.1.5

Two threads this release. First, a family of new drawing tools in the lineage of Illustrator, Inkscape, and Procreate: pen-and-pull curves, a curvature tool, French curve presets, and a freehand pencil that snaps to clean shapes, all usable by touch or Apple Pencil. Second, a cleaner workspace: tools in a tabbed rail, a single File menu, a tool scope selector, and a grid that follows your zoom.

New ways to draw

  • Pen and pull: click points to fit a smooth curve through them, press-drag to pull handles as you place or select and drag a handle later to reshape it live, and switch any point between corner, smooth, and symmetric. Exports to DXF like any spline.
  • Curvature tool: fits a flowing curve through the points you click, with a live preview and clean handling of tight turns next to long runs.
  • French curves: drop a named, to-scale curve (armhole, neckline, hip, sleeve cap, rise, or styling) between two points, flippable to either side.
  • Freehand pencil: sketch a line that becomes a smooth, editable curve on release, with smoothing you can tune from off to heavy.
  • Snap to a clean shape: hold still at the end of a pencil stroke and it snaps to a real line, arc, circle, ellipse, rectangle, or polygon; let go without holding and the freehand line stays as drawn.
  • Touch and Apple Pencil: every draw tool works under a finger or a stylus, so Pixie Space is usable on an iPad.

A cleaner workspace

  • Tabbed tool rail: tools live in a tabbed rail down the left edge, one tab per group, foldable to give the canvas back the room, and every tool now carries its own icon.
  • One File menu: Open, Export, and Plot sit together under a single File menu, and the current layer moved to the Layers panel where it belongs.
  • Tool scope selector: pick Basic, Apparel, or All to tailor the toolset; Apparel adds the French curve presets, drafting, grading from measurement files, and nesting.
  • Grid that follows your zoom: grid spacing adapts to zoom instead of a fixed size, and the cursor snaps to it with no separate switch.

Released

0.1.4

A fix release for the parametric .val workflow (Seamly2D and Valentina pattern files), one of the workflows Space supports. Plus one general change to block creation.

Parametric .val workflow fixed

  • Formula increments stay live. Swapping in a new .vit measurement file now redraws everything, including geometry that flows through increments.
  • Opening a .val without its measurement file no longer permanently drops pieces that need unknown measurements. They wait as pending and appear when the .vit lands, even after a .pspace save and reload.
  • # prefixed increment names now work in formulas.
  • One .vit swap is one undo step.
  • The status bar reports pending, restored, and failed counts instead of half-updating in silence.

Blocks copy instead of move

  • Create block from selection leaves the originals in place and builds the block from copies, placed beside the source. On a .val file the originals keep following measurements; the block is a frozen snapshot.

Dimensions follow geometry

  • Snap a dimension to a point and it sticks. Move the geometry, by any means, and the dimension and its number move with it.
  • Dimensions placed in empty space stay put. Dragging a dimension end off its point lets go of just that end.
  • Older .pspace saves no longer open. Re-import the source file and save again.

Light mode contrast

  • A contrast pass on light mode. The coordinate readout, highlighted values and links, and panel text are readable on light backgrounds, and panel inputs no longer render with dark browser styling.

Fixes

  • Editing a relation value from the panel while inside a block view silently did nothing. Relation edits now always apply to the drawing.

Released

0.1.3

Pixie Space now opens on a light, paper-like canvas, with a one-click switch back to dark. Drawings stay readable whichever background you pick, and your saved colors never change.

Light mode

  • The canvas defaults to a light background, closer to the paper your work prints on. A sun and moon button in the toolbar switches between light and dark, and your choice persists across sessions.
  • Layer colors are resolved for the active background as they are drawn, so a drawing whose lines were near-white for a dark canvas stays visible on white, and a near-black drawing stays visible on dark.
  • Your stored colors are never rewritten, so DXF, PDF, and SVG export carry exactly the colors they did before.
  • Selection, snapping guides, and relation highlights are tuned to read clearly on both backgrounds.

Released

0.1.2

Faster on large drawings, and easier to keep work aligned. Drawing now uses your GPU, and a new object-snap-tracking mode lines your work up with the geometry around the cursor.

GPU rendering

  • Drawing now uses your GPU, so panning, zooming, and redraws stay smooth as a pattern grows to thousands of lines.
  • On automatically where your hardware supports it.

Object-snap-tracking

  • As you draw, alignment rays appear from the endpoints of nearby lines, parallel and perpendicular to each line.
  • The cursor snaps onto those rays, and onto the points where two of them cross, so squaring off existing geometry and lining up with an existing point takes fewer clicks.
  • It tracks the segment you are drawing too, so turning a clean 90 degrees off your last segment is one move.
  • Toggled from the status-bar Polar chip, alongside the existing polar steps.

Released

0.1.1

First patch series after the public preview. Vector export reaches PDF and SVG, the text tool stabilizes, and snapping behaves under rotation.

Print, plot to scale, PDF and SVG export

  • Plot modal sets paper size (A4, A3, A2, Letter, Tabloid, or custom), portrait or landscape, margins, and scale.
  • Scale modes: fit-to-page or explicit ratio. 1:1 for full-size patterns, 1:50 for floor plans, 1/4 inch equals 1 foot for architectural, or any custom ratio.
  • Region clipping: plot the whole drawing or just the current selection.
  • Multi-page tiling for drawings larger than one sheet, with registration marks at seam corners for tape-together assembly.
  • Output to PDF, SVG, or browser print (the PDF opens in a new tab and the browser's PDF viewer handles the print dialog).
  • SVG output carries entity stroke, fill, layer color, and lineweight.

Text tool and text DXF

  • Text import fixed across DXF dialects; rotation, alignment, height, and justification round-trip cleanly.
  • MTEXT entities now read as single-line text with the formatting flattened, so legacy drawings open without losing strings.
  • Text emission matches in PDF and SVG output the way it renders on the canvas.

Snap and rotation

  • Angle snap now respects rotation, so snapping during rotate stays predictable.

Released

0.1.0

The first public preview. Pixie Space arrives as a complete 2D drafting canvas in the browser. The list below is what the app does today, not a diff against a prior version. A deep generic CAD floor underneath, with a 14-kind relation system and a theme-aware UI on top.

Drawing primitives

  • Lines, arcs, circles, polylines, splines, ellipses, regular polygons.
  • Free-draw spline as a peer of line and polyline.
  • Construction lines (xlines) for layout work.
  • Single-line text with named text styles.
  • Hatches with SOLID fill and the ANSI 31 to 38 pattern catalog. Editable pattern, scale, and angle per region.
  • Blocks with attributes; insert blocks; edit blocks in place via enter-block and exit-block.

Relations and dimensions

  • 14 relation kinds across three categories. Geometric: coincident, parallel, perpendicular, tangent, concentric, symmetric, entity-angle-absolute (horizontal or vertical lock).
  • Dimensional relations render as visible dimensions on the canvas: linear (horizontal, vertical, aligned), angular between two lines, radial and diametric on arcs and circles.
  • Scalar arithmetic: equal, difference, ratio. New relations pre-fill the current measured value at placement, so the geometry does not jump when a relation is added.
  • Free scalar for value-only parameters that no entity drives.

Annotations and styles

  • Auto center marks for arcs and circles.
  • Leader lines with arrowhead and text label.
  • Dimension styles with decimal precision, architectural feet-inch, and engineering formats. Per-relation style override.
  • Text styles with STYLE table round-trip through DXF.
  • Annotative scaling: text scales between 8 and 200 pixels with zoom; dimension labels stay at fixed screen size for legibility.

Drawing aids and snap

  • Object snap to endpoints, midpoints, intersections, perpendicular, tangent, nearest, center, quadrant.
  • In-progress snap: multi-step tools snap to their own drafts, so a polyline can close back on its own start point.
  • Grid display and grid snap, toggleable from the status-bar Grid chip.
  • Polar tracking cycling through Off, 5 degrees, 30 degrees, 45 degrees, and Ortho via the status-bar Polar chip. Ctrl modifier overrides transiently at 5 or 1 degree.
  • Direct distance entry: type a number while a tool has an anchor, Enter commits at distance times direction.
  • Relative coordinate input with bare or @-prefixed forms: 30,40 or @30,40.
  • Polar coordinate input: 30 less-than 45 or @30 less-than 45.
  • Dynamic input overlay floats length and angle next to the cursor while a tool has an anchor.
  • Coordinate HUD pinned bottom-right shows live x and y.

Editing operations

  • Move, rotate, scale, mirror, copy.
  • Offset with side selection.
  • Trim and extend against any boundary.
  • Fillet with radius; chamfer with distance or angle.
  • Break at point and explode.
  • Stretch by vertex drag.
  • Define block from selection; insert block; edit block in place.
  • Clipboard with copy and paste, including paste preview at the cursor.

Vertex editing

  • Vertex grip handles on selection. Drag a vertex and the geometry follows.
  • Keyboard Tab and Shift Tab cycle vertex focus; Enter takes a scalar.
  • Insert and delete vertex on polylines.
  • Spline control-point drag through the same grip surface.

Selection

  • Window and crossing rectangle marquees.
  • Window polygon, crossing polygon, and fence selections with multi-vertex pickers and live previews.
  • Recall last or previous selection from an 8-deep history ring.
  • Shift adds to selection; Ctrl subtracts.
  • Quick filter by entity kind and by layer. Select-all and narrow verbs on the filter panel.
  • Entity info panel: layer, block attributes, text content and height, leader content, hatch pattern, scale, angle, all editable.
  • Multi-select aggregate inquiry: count, kind histogram, total length, total area, closed regions, bounding box.

Layers

  • Layer name, color, visibility, and lock states.
  • Layer linetypes: continuous, dashed, dotted, center, hidden, phantom. Dash patterns scale with zoom.
  • Layer lineweights; rendered at minimum 1 pixel so default-zero still strokes a hairline.
  • Move entities to layer; recolor layer in bulk.
  • Layer template and an onboarding tutorial drawing for first-time visitors.

Inquiry and measurement

  • Distance and angle readouts at the cursor while a drawing tool is anchored.
  • Area on closed polylines, full circles, and ellipses; total area across a multi-selection.
  • Interactive AREA command: click vertices around any region, Enter commits with area and perimeter.
  • List entity properties for one or many entities through the multi-select aggregate.
  • Snap readouts at the cursor.

File formats

  • DXF read and write, generic and AAMA dialects. Carries blocks, hatches, text and dimension styles, layer linetypes, block attributes.
  • Native pspace format for fast saves and reloads.

Viewing

  • Zoom window, zoom all, zoom extents, zoom scale, zoom previous.
  • Pan with middle-mouse or modifier-drag.
  • Camera scale rail for fast zoom-to-scale.
  • Block view mode: enter a block to edit in its local space, exit to return.

UI and workflow

  • Command palette: Ctrl+K opens a fuzzy search over the full command set.
  • Keyboard shortcuts customizable through a shortcut config persisted in browser storage.
  • Undo and redo through the action history.
  • Light and dark themes; toggle preference persists across sessions.
  • Movable, draggable panels with anchor snapping. Panel positions persist in browser storage.
  • Lucide icons embedded inline so the WASM bundle stays offline-friendly.
  • Built-in manual modal for keyboard shortcuts and command reference.
  • Snapshots: save and restore camera plus selection state.
  • Status bar with snap readout, polar chip, grid chip.
  • Version badge in the toolbar copies cleanly into a bug report.

App

  • Browser-native. No install, no account, no upload.
  • Local-first by design: drawings stay on your machine until you choose to send them.
  • Lobby and Community links live in the toolbar.

Try it

Open the app, draw something, send feedback. Pixie Space is free and runs in your browser.

Open Pixie Space →