The Sketch guide

Sketch is for drawing your experiment setup: the diagram at the top of a lab report that shows how everything was connected. The equipment is already drawn for you; your job is only to arrange and label it. Sketch needs a free Plot45 account; sign up or sign in first.

Placing equipment

The Sketch app: the equipment palette on the left and a labelled Hooke's law setup (retort stand, ruler, spring and hanging mass) on the canvas. — The Sketch app, with a finished Hooke's law setup on the canvas.

The palette on the left holds real lab equipment (beakers, thermometers, burners, cells, bulbs, meters, stands and more) drawn as clear, simple symbols, the kind you see in a textbook. Click a symbol (or drag it) to place it on the page. The search box at the top of the palette finds a symbol by name, which is quicker than scrolling through the categories.

The palette's category rail: Shapes, Glass, Heat, Electric, Mech and Optics, with the Shapes set open at its Shapes, Draw and Text groups. — The categories: Shapes, Glassware, Heating, Electrical, Mechanics, Optics.

The Shapes category holds the general-purpose shapes: rectangles, circles and triangles, a pencil and a curve for drawing freehand, and the Corner shape tool for anything with straight sides of your own, like a glass block or a slope. Click each corner in turn, then click the first corner again to close the shape. The longer categories are split into groups, so Electrical starts with power and Mechanics starts with stands and clamps.

Arranging things

Move: drag a symbol, or nudge it with the arrow keys for small steps.
Resize: drag a corner handle.
Rotate: use the rotation control in the inspector on the right.
Front and back: the inspector's order buttons bring a symbol forward or send it behind another.

The inspector also sets a symbol's line weight and fill, so your diagram stays consistent.

Several at once

Drag on empty paper to draw a box around several things and select them together, or hold Shift and click them one by one. A selection like that moves together, and dragging a corner of the outer box resizes the whole set as one.

Grouping (Ctrl+G) makes the selection permanent. From then on, clicking any member selects the whole group, and double-clicking reaches inside it to select one piece. Alignment treats a group as a single object, which is usually what you want when a labelled instrument has to line up with something else. Ctrl+Shift+G ungroups again.

Drawing by hand

Three tools draw shapes the symbol palette does not have. Each one keeps its own pen, meaning its own colour, weight and line style. Set the pen first, and every stroke you then draw uses it.

Pencil: draw freehand on the paper. Every stroke uses the same pen until you change it.
Corner shape: click each corner in turn. Click the first corner again to close the shape, or press Enter to leave it open.
Curve: drag on the paper to place it, then bend it by its handles.

Escape, or the Select button, puts the tool away again.

Colour and paint

Click the colour chip on any selected shape and a small palette opens. It holds a row of greys and a grid of hues, and every colour has an ordinary name, such as Teal or Navy, rather than a code. The same palette appears everywhere in Plot45 that asks for a colour, so a colour you choose in Sketch matches the one with the same name in Write.

Fills: a closed shape can take a fill as well as a line colour. Choose None for an outline only, or one of the gentle tints, which print well and suit water, gas shading and highlights.
Symbols: a symbol's colours can be changed from the same palette. Choosing Original puts the equipment back the way it was first drawn.
The pen: the drawing tools keep their own colour, weight and line style, as described under Drawing by hand.

Zoom and the hand tool

You can zoom from 25% to 400%, either with Ctrl and your scroll wheel or with the controls in the toolbar. While you are zoomed in, the hand tool moves the paper around, and holding Space does the same. Zooming in is the comfortable way to do detailed work on a small part of the drawing.

When the window changes size, the view refits itself so that the whole drawing stays visible. A sketch opened on a different screen therefore shows everything from the start.

Labels and arrows

Use the text tool to name the parts ("50 g mass", "retort stand") and the line and arrow tools to point each label at the thing it names. Short labels with straight arrows are the easiest to read, and they are what a mark scheme expects.

Exporting your diagram

SVG or PNG: a sharp, clear image on plain white paper, ready for a printed report or a slide.
Straight into Write: save the sketch to your workspace, then in Write use the sketch-insert button to drop it into your report as a numbered figure.