Pencil 4.0

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Pencil 4.0 transforms Pencil into an AI-ready visual design studio! You can now pair your favorite AI coding assistants directly with Pencil to build, refine, and iterate on vector wireframes in real time.

Key Highlights

• Design Wireframes with AI : Connect assistants like Claude Desktop, Cursor, Antigravity, and VS Code to design, arrange, and edit wireframes on your canvas using natural language.
• Instant, Zero-Lag Canvas Updates : AI operations happen in memory in real time, with no waiting on disk polling, reloads, or file saving.
• Smart Auto-Layout Containers (@group) : Group UI components into automatic horizontal (row) or vertical (column) stacks with automatic bounding boxes; say goodbye to manual pixel math and tedious coordinate nudging!
• AI "Sees" What You See : Connected assistants can request live canvas snapshots and cropped previews (render_preview ) to visually inspect layout, typography, and contrast just like a human designer.
• Watch Your AI Work Live : See active edits in real time with live canvas animation overlays and a floating status pill (AgentStatusPill ).

Model Context Protocol (MCP) Features & Tools

• Draw, Style & Rearrange : Full control to add, update, reposition, group, align, and delete canvas elements (insert_shapes ,update_shapes ,align_shapes ,distribute_shapes ).
• Full Document & Multi-Page Control : Assistants can navigate and structure projects autonomously (list_pages ,create_page ,rename_page ,switch_page ).
• Icon & Stencil Discovery : Assistants can search installed icon libraries (Tabler, Lucide, FontAwesome) and discover UI components across all installed collections (search_resources ,list_collections ).
• Privacy & Collection Governance : Decide which stencil libraries and assets the AI can see, with complete toggle control in application preferences.
• 1-Click Assistant Setup : Built-in configuration generator inSettings > MCP with one-click copying for popular assistants, plus server lifecycle controls (start/stop/restart) onhttp://localhost:1919/mcp .

Canvas, Stencils & UI Enhancements

• Declarative 4-tier style resolution engine with type-scoped defaults and single-inheritance custom styles.
• Support for right-angle (90°) connectors (#380 ).
• New image editor tool with expand and shrink support for image data (ImageEditDialog ).
• Support copying and pasting images across different Pencil documents (#393 ).
• Batch selection in Font Management Dialog.
• Configurable handle color for canvas editors.
• On-screen editing for blank plain text shapes.
• Create collection files directly in Stencil Generator (#645 ).
• Search and filter collections in Collection Management Dialog; view collection versions.
• Non-blocking update notification dialogs for Pencil and installed stencil collections.

Bug Fixes & Improvements

• Fixed canvas shape dimension resizing in update_shapes and hardened top-level box schema.
• Fixed direct SVG transform manipulation in update_shapes andinsert_shapes .
• Fixed rotation handling when rasterizing selection.

- Fixed HTML code colors not appearing in recently used colors ([#422](https://github.com/evolus/pencil/issues/422) ).
- Fixed menu positioning and implemented menu overflow mode for long menus ([#603](https://github.com/evolus/pencil/issues/603) ).

• Fixed image bounds invalidation on offscreen canvas.
• Fixed fallback handling in font editor for missing fonts.
• Fixed alignment options for Process shapes in Flowchart.
• Fixed text alignment for List Box shape.
• Fixed HTML entity rendering (& ) in links.
• Removed obsolete OpenClipart pane.