What DrawBench does
- A shared board by link: up to 16 people draw on one board at once and see each other’s strokes as they are drawn, with a cursor and a name for everyone.
- Tools: pencil, marker, eraser, line, rectangle, ellipse and text, eight colours plus any colour, and a width for each tool.
- Stylus pressure: with a pen on a tablet or a graphics tablet, the pencil line gets thicker as you press harder.
- Endless board: move it and zoom from 10 % to 800 % with two fingers, the mouse wheel or the buttons in the corner.
- Undo and redo of your own actions, and an eraser that removes only your own drawings.
- Export of the whole drawing to PNG or SVG.
- Works alone, even offline: the board is kept in your browser until you share it.
Draw together in three steps
- Open DrawBench and press Create a link. Your board gets an address like
fof.lol/draw/#/b/…and a QR code. - Send the link in a chat or let someone scan the QR code. They open it in any modern browser; no app and no account.
- Draw. Everyone sees new strokes while they are being drawn, and cursors with names show where the others are. Change your name in On the board so the others know who is who.
Whatever you drew before sharing stays on the board, and the others receive it when they join. The same link works again later, as long as someone hosts the board (see Who keeps the board).
Tools and shortcuts
| Tool | Key | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Pencil | P | a smooth freehand line; with a stylus its width follows the pressure |
| Marker | M | a wide translucent line for highlighting |
| Eraser | E | removes whole drawings it touches, only your own |
| Line | L | a straight line; hold Shift for 45° steps |
| Rectangle, ellipse | R, O | drag from corner to corner; hold Shift for a square or a circle |
| Text | T | click where the text should start and type; Enter finishes, Shift+Enter starts a new line, Esc cancels |
| Move | H | drag the board; on a computer you can also hold Space, or drag with the middle or right mouse button |
More keys: Ctrl+Z undo, Ctrl+Shift+Z or Ctrl+Y redo, [ and ] thinner and thicker, + and − zoom, 0 back to 100 %, F shows the whole drawing. The mouse wheel moves the board; Ctrl + wheel (or a pinch on a touchpad) zooms around the cursor. The button with four corners opens the board on the whole screen.
Each tool remembers its own width, and the colour, tool and widths are remembered in this browser.
Phones, tablets and styluses
- One finger draws with the chosen tool; two fingers move and zoom the board. If the second finger lands right after the first one, the beginning of the stroke is dropped, so zooming does not leave marks.
- Stylus (Apple Pencil, S Pen, Surface Pen, a graphics tablet): the pencil uses the pressure of the pen. Once the board has felt a stylus, fingers only move and zoom it, so your palm resting on the screen does not draw.
- For a big drawing, use full screen: the toolbar stays on top, and the board takes the rest.
Your strokes are yours
Every drawing on the board belongs to the person who drew it. Undo, Redo, the Eraser and Clear my drawings work only on your own drawings. Nobody can wipe someone else’s work, by accident or on purpose; if you try to erase another person’s line, DrawBench says so.
This rule is also why changes never clash. Each drawing has a single author and a version number; whenever two versions meet, the newer one wins, and a newer version can only come from the author. So it does not matter in which order changes arrive: every device ends up with exactly the same board, and nothing has to be merged by hand.
Undo restores a drawing in its old place among the others, not on top. The undo history lives in the page: after a reload you can still erase your drawings, but not undo older steps.
Who keeps the board
There is no DrawBench server that stores boards. The person who creates the link hosts the board in their browser tab: everyone who opens the link connects to that tab, receives the whole board, and from then on every change goes through it to everyone else. A small public server, PeerJS, only introduces the browsers to each other.
- Keep the host’s page open. While it hosts a board with people on it, its screen stays on, and closing the tab asks for confirmation.
- If the host leaves, everyone keeps their copy and can go on drawing alone. Anyone can press Host the board from here: their copy becomes the board, the same link works again, and the others reconnect to it by themselves.
- If the host just reloads the page, it takes the board back automatically.
- What you draw while disconnected is not lost: when you connect again, your drawings are sent to the board.
When it won’t connect
DrawBench uses WebRTC, the technology behind video calls in the browser, to connect browsers directly. Usually it just works, but some networks get in the way:
- “Couldn’t connect to the board”: the board exists, but your devices could not find a path to each other. This happens behind strict NAT or a firewall: mobile networks that share one public address between many customers (carrier-grade NAT), office, school, hotel and café Wi-Fi, some VPNs. Video-call services solve this with their own relay servers (TURN) that pass the traffic around the obstacle; DrawBench has none of its own. The free public relay of PeerJS may help, but it works only over UDP and is often blocked or busy.
- What helps: put both devices on the same Wi-Fi; switch one of them to mobile data or another network; turn off the VPN; try a different browser. Then press Try again.
- “Nobody is hosting this board right now”: the person who shared it has closed the page. Ask them to open it again, or host it yourself.
- “Can’t reach the connection server”: there is no internet, or something blocks
0.peerjs.com(a strict firewall or an ad blocker).
Once connected, the panel next to the board shows whether the connection is Direct, device to device or goes Through a relay server (the host sees it for each participant); both are encrypted.
Saving the drawing
- PNG: a picture of the whole drawing (not only the part on screen) on a white background, at twice the screen resolution, up to 8192 pixels on the longer side.
- SVG: a vector file that stays sharp at any size and opens in Inkscape, Figma, Illustrator and browsers. Every drawing is a separate path, text stays text.
- On this device: the board is saved in your browser as you draw. The last eight boards are listed in Boards on this device; New board starts a clean one, and the old ones stay in the list.
Privacy
Boards are never uploaded to fof.lol. Drawing alone sends nothing anywhere. When you share a board, the drawings, cursor positions and names go over encrypted WebRTC connections between the browsers on the board, and each of them keeps a copy. To find each other, the browsers exchange random IDs and network addresses through the PeerJS server and learn their public address from Google’s STUN server. The link itself is random and long: only people you send it to can find the board, and only while someone hosts it.
Limits
- Up to 16 people on one board at once, and up to 20 000 drawings on it.
- A board lives in browsers. If nobody has it open and all copies are deleted, it is gone: export what matters.
- A browser keeps only a few megabytes per site; a huge board may not fit, and DrawBench then suggests exporting it.
- Pictures cannot be pasted onto the board yet.
Frequently asked questions
Do the others need an account or an app?
No. A link and a current browser on a phone, tablet or computer are enough.
Can someone erase what I drew?
No. Only the author of a drawing can erase it or undo it.
Why did the board stop updating?
Most likely the host closed the page or lost the connection. DrawBench shows a message and keeps trying to reconnect. You can host the board yourself, and the others will join you.
Does it work on iPhone and iPad?
Yes, in Safari and other browsers. Keep the page in front while drawing together: iOS pauses pages in the background.
Is there a fill or a select-and-move tool?
Not yet. Shapes are outlines; to move a drawing, erase it and draw it again, or use Undo.
Why is the board white in dark mode?
It is paper: the colours you pick look the same on every screen, in the PNG and in the SVG.