Ardesia turns your screen into a digital sketchpad to annotate or draw
on the entire screen. It also lets you record and stream it on the
network with vlc. You can draw upon the desktop or import an image
as well as annotate and redistribute it. Ardesia is also pressure
sensitive assuming your device is properly configured.
USER TIPS:
Ardesia functions differently under different window managers.
Fluxbox/Blackbox: D-
Even with cairo-compmgr or xcompmgr these only function with a solid color
background. You may have difficulty selecting tool box, try launching
with '-d'. As for other minimalist window managers, you are on your own.
XFCE: C
The drawing window has a title bar and you can't type in windows unless shaded
or minimized. Unknown work around for this.
KDE: A+
Default KDE settings will darken the screen. To fix this
System Settings > All Effects Tab > Shadow Properties > Uncheck Active windows
have stronger shadows > Disable Shadows (important if running) > Click Apply.
Optionally re-enable Shadows and click Apply.
GNOME 3.0: F
Sorry, I have no work around for the issues with this window manager.
- The Application hides the bar at the top (you can still access Activities
with a shortcut key.
- The Tool Box will always be below the drawing window.
- Because of the tool box, the main features of pictures, pdf, an screen
record can not be accessed.
Other:
If you have 'focus' extensions that gray out everything but the focused
window, you will probably have to disable it. However, if you are using
compiz, you probably are not using ardesia because there is a plugin for all
this functionality.
General:
Depending on the window manager, you may need to launch as "ardesia -d" to
obtain control of the tools panel. This may also require tweaking of other
settings to have the pannel appear on top of the drawing overlay window. You
may have to toggle "always on top" for the drawing window if you are capable
of toggling it seperatly from the tool box window.
The "mouse option" only seems to effectively work in KDE and XFCE. This is
a pass through mode that will interact with the desktop below the drawing
window.
The PDF export will allow you to add new pages to a pdf that are screen
captures of when the button is pressed. It does not save vector shapes.
Here some xprops of the windows if you can control windows based on these:
Tool Box:
WM_CLASS(STRING) = "ardesia", "Ardesia"
WM_NAME(STRING) = "Ardesia"
Drawing Window:
WM_CLASS(STRING) = "ardesia", "Ardesia"
WM_NAME(STRING) = "window"
Runtime Required:
- A Composite manager (compiz, kwin, xcompmgr, cairo-compmgr, etc.)
Runtime Optional:
- VLC for recording and streaming
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