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

0.2.0

The first vertical gets its Design to Production release. The Apparel scope learns sewing and placement: draw sewing between pattern pieces or let Pixie Gravity propose both sewing and placement, then carry the result into Pixie Hologram, the new fit-test application. Generation Magic Pencil brings drawing help. And the core canvas picks up plugins that load on first use, and introduces a Google sign-in for plugins and companion applications.

Sewing and placement for Apparel

  • Sewing between pattern pieces is now drawn, displayed, and saved on the canvas, by hand or proposed by Gravity auto sew.
  • A placement window locates each piece on a body schematic, by hand or by Gravity auto place, so a pattern knows where it hangs. Drag a piece to a body landmark to set where it hangs and a second to set what it aligns to, mark it left, right, or center, flip it, or mirror a placement onto its partner piece.
  • Gravity Auto Sew and Gravity Auto Place are Pixie Gravity 0.1.0, in its first release. It proposes, you correct, and it takes your corrections into account.
  • Pixie Hologram, the new fit-test application, sews the pattern together and drapes it on a body at true size. The full notes live in the Fashion tab above.

Sewing on the canvas

  • Sewing renders as paired color highlights on both pieces with a thin connector between them, so which edge sews to which is readable at a glance.
  • Add sewing in four clicks: start and end on one piece, start and end on the partner. Clicks snap to corners, so two corner clicks pick a whole edge exactly, and a piece can sew to itself, a dart for instance. A remove mode deletes the sewing nearest each click.
  • Sewing is saved with the drawing and anchored to the geometry, so it follows your edits. Sewing whose edge was deleted shows dashed until you re-add it.

Generation Magic Pencil

  • Generation Magic Pencil turns a freehand stroke into the pattern edge you meant: sketch roughly and it smooths the curve into a clean edge, ready to pull and refine like any drawn path.
  • It is trained on a large corpus of real garment patterns, and it proposes: accept, pull to adjust, or undo. Generation Magic Pencil is part of Pixie Generation 0.1.0, in its first release. The full notes live in the Fashion tab above.

Dimensions

  • Apparel carries its full POM (points of measure) menu, and dimensions already placed render in every scope.
  • Dimensions export as real DXF dimension entities with their styles, so they arrive intact in AutoCAD, LibreCAD, and other CAD tools instead of silently disappearing from the file.

Plugins and companion apps

  • Heavier features now arrive as plugins that load the moment you first use them, so the app you open stays light.
  • Plugins and companion applications such as Pixie Hologram ask you to sign in with Google. Drafting needs no sign-in.
  • Nothing new is stored: your drawings still never leave the browser. The details are on the privacy page.

0.1.7

The Quilting scope arrives as a full authoring surface: draft a block on a dimensional block grid, drop pieced units and curved-piecing arcs, audition fabrics in a color mockup, and lay a whole quilt top in straight or on-point sets with sashing, cornerstones, and borders. Seam allowance becomes a per-layer value you can set and preview as a cut line, in the Apparel and Quilting scopes. The Apparel scope learns cut-on-fold pieces, unfolding half-panels and closing open seam lines, and the Layers panel labels each AAMA layer by its pattern meaning. And a broad workspace and input pass built from early user feedback: compact tabbed panel stacks, drawing tools that preview their true curves, a ruled grid with its own snap toggle, and first-class touch gestures.

Quilt authoring

  • A new Quilting tool scope joins the scope selector, alongside Basic, Apparel, Vinyl & Stickers, and All, carrying the full basic toolset.
  • A block grid sized to your finished block: set the finished size and pieces snap to the block lattice. It holds the real block size as you zoom, so one cell is always one block.
  • Fabric color fill: a fabric is a layer, so recoloring the layer recolors every patch of that fabric at once. Switch to the fabric view for a finished-quilt mockup, or the coloring-page view for clean printable outlines, and export either to SVG.
  • Pieced-unit tool: drag a box to drop a half-square triangle, quarter-square triangle, or flying-geese unit at its finished size, each patch on its own fabric layer.
  • Quilt curves for curved piecing and applique: drop a Drunkard's Path, clamshell, or orange-peel arc between two points, then pull it to refine like any pen path.
  • Lay a quilt top: arrange a block you have defined into a straight or on-point grid, with sashing, cornerstones, borders, and setting triangles. The blocks share one definition, so recoloring one fabric updates every block.
  • Or place blocks one at a time, turning in 90-degree steps and snapping to the block grid, for samplers, medallions, and rotated sets a single repeating grid can't make.

Apparel: half-panels, seams, and layer meanings

  • Unfold pieces drawn on the fold. When a piece is drafted as a half against its mirror line, Space spots it as the file loads and offers to mirror and weld it into the full piece. Step through candidates with a ghost preview, or unfold them all at once.
  • Close open seam lines. Where a seam line is missing the one section that would close it, Space offers to add it, with a preview, and never closes across a fold.
  • The Layers panel labels each AAMA layer with its pattern meaning: mirror line, seam line, grain line, grade reference, and the rest, so a piece imported from a DXF stays readable at a glance.
  • Set a seam allowance on a layer, as a number in your drawing's unit, in the Apparel and Quilting scopes, where a piece is drawn at its finished size and cut a little wider.
  • Preview the cut line: a dashed ghost offset around closed shapes whose layer carries a seam allowance, finished line and cut line together.

Workspace and input

  • The side panels reorganize into compact tabbed stacks: Tools on the left, and Layers, Relations, View, Blocks, and Entity Info as slim tabs on the right. Minimize a stack to its strip; your arrangement is saved and restored. A Home button frames the drawing and Back to model returns from block editing.
  • Tools are one-shot: a drawing or edit tool returns to Select after it commits, clicking the active tool's button cancels it, and Backspace removes the last placed point. The pen-and-pull, spline, and curvature tools preview their true curve as you place and pull.
  • Right-click, or long-press on touch, acts in context: flip a French or quilt curve mid-draw, or type exact measurements while placing or resizing. The browser's own menu stays out of the way.
  • Touch parity for the iPad: double-tap commits a multi-point path, a floating Done and Cancel bar stands in for Enter and Escape, and undo and redo buttons join the toolbar.
  • Placement control: Shift locks the angle, Ctrl steps it, and Alt suspends snapping. The grid draws as ruled lines, with dots as an option, and snap-to-grid is its own toggle.
  • Selection and relations: arrow keys nudge, a multi-selection shows its vertices and drags as a group from any member, scale accepts a negative factor to mirror, and relations highlight both ways between panel and canvas, now accepting polylines, arcs, splines, and ellipses.
  • Polish: the text lettering tools move to the Vinyl & Stickers and Quilting scopes where cut and applique lettering happen, every dialog gains a close button, dark-theme contrast gets a pass, and the French curve preset sleeve cap is renamed sleeve head.

0.1.6

A big one, in two threads. The new Vinyl & Stickers scope gained a full run of cut-authoring tools, all free and in the browser: weld letters and shapes into one cut path, cut text in a font straight or along a curve, contour and outline cut lines, add registration marks and weeding lines, and export cut-ready PLT alongside SVG, DXF, and PDF. The pattern side grew too: long multi-segment curves import in full, new curve and point tools build paths through points, and you can resize to an exact size and set the drawing's unit. Layers gained cut order, a material tag, a role, and a lock.

Vinyl & Stickers: a cut-authoring toolset

  • Weld overlapping shapes and letters into one cut path, so a script word or stack of shapes cuts as a single outline. A hole, like the middle of an O, stays open. Combine keeps the originals; subtract cuts one shape from another; intersect keeps only the overlap.
  • Cut text in any font: type a word, pick a font, set a height, and place it as cut-ready outlines, with Weld to fuse connected letters. Convert a text label already in your drawing the same way. A starter set of fonts loads on demand. Or lay text along a line, arc, or curve, above or below it, sliding where it starts.
  • Contour a closed cut line around a shape, and outline an open line, curve, or arc into a closed cut shape of a width you type, keeping the original. Useful for vinyl, a laser kerf body, or a stitch channel.
  • Frame a design with print-and-cut registration marks, and add weeding lines that segment the leftover material into peelable panels. Both drop on the cut layer, ready to export.
  • Place text and image variable-data slots, bind them to a CSV column, and flip through records to preview each one composited in place. The template stays one drawing and holds no pixels of its own; the data rides alongside, referenced by path.
  • Export cut-ready PLT (HPGL) for vinyl cutters, alongside SVG, DXF, and PDF. Load a .plt back in, from the File menu or by drag and drop, to inspect a cut file. SVG now appears in the open dialog too.
  • Layers gained cut order: reorder with up and down arrows and SVG export follows it. Tag a layer with a material, like a vinyl color, with common colors suggested as you type. Set a layer's role (cut, sew, grain, notch, and the rest) and lock a layer to protect it.

Pattern, curve, and unit tools

  • Patterns that use long, multi-segment Bezier curves now import in full. The curves come through as editable splines, and the pieces built on top of them rebuild correctly instead of arriving incomplete.
  • Two new curve tools build a path through a run of points you pick: a cubic Bezier path that chains segments through them, and an interactive path that fits a smooth curve. Two new point tools work off curves: cut on path drops a point a measured distance along a curve, and curve intersect axis places a point where a curve crosses a line through a point at an angle. All stay tied to their points and rebuild when they move.
  • Join welds selected lines, arcs, curves, and polylines into a single polyline end to end, flipping any reversed segment and flattening curves, so a contour assembled from mixed pieces becomes one outline. In the Edit section, alongside Reverse.
  • Offset a whole closed shape as one outline: pick a closed polyline, ellipse, or pen path, type a distance, and click the side. Choose how corners join, miter, round, or bevel, with miter falling back to bevel on sharp corners. Handy for a seam allowance around a pattern piece or a cut line around a shape.
  • Resize to an exact size: set a selection's width and height in real units, locked to scale evenly or unlocked to stretch, pivoting on the center or any corner. Fit to stock scales a selection to sit inside a sheet size. Stretching a circle or arc unevenly turns it into the ellipse or curve it should become.
  • Set the drawing's unit, millimeters, centimeters, meters, inches, or feet, shown in the ruler corner and the coordinate readout. Type sizes with a unit and they convert, so "8in" works in a millimeter drawing. The unit is saved with the file and carried through DXF.
  • Text can be rotated and keeps its angle through saves and DXF. Vinyl & Stickers joins the tool scope selector alongside Basic, Apparel, and All, and every scope now carries the full basic toolset. Select objects across layers and a panel dropdown moves the whole selection to one layer.
  • Load the AAMA apparel layer set (Piece Boundary, Internal, Grainline, Notch, Seam Allowance, Annotation, Mirror Line) in one click from the Layers panel. In the Apparel scope.

Fixes

  • Block layer edits apply now. Creating a layer inside a block view adds it to the drawing's shared layer list, and assigning a layer to a selected block, or from inside a block view, moves its geometry onto that layer, so a contour you joined into a block can be set to the cut layer.
  • Drafting tools commit to the active snap, not the raw cursor. Picks from the construction tools and the two interactive curve tools now land exactly on the geometry you snapped to.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 →