Pen & Brush Annotation Tool

The Pen Tool brings expressive, unrestricted freehand drawing into the Quatick terminal. Unlike geometric shape tools that enforce rigid lines or rectangles, the pen tool allows traders, analysts, and educators to draw natural curves, circle swing points, highlight imbalance zones, and illustrate complex market wave flows directly across candlestick bars.

Every stroke drawn with the pen tool is automatically decomposed into a stream of chart data coordinates: each vertex captures the precise timestamp and price level beneath the pointer. As you pan across historical sessions, zoom in to scrutinize a lower timeframe, or stretch the vertical price scale, every drawn stroke scales and translates in exact lockstep with the candles underneath.

Equipped with the top-docked Pen Style Popup, you can transform any drawn stroke on the fly: switch between ink pens and translucent highlighters, modify tip geometry from rounded to angled chisel calligraphy, fine-tune stroke width from 1px to 48px, adjust alpha transparency, and dial in curve smoothing.

Tip shape dictates how stroke endpoints, corners, and line joins are constructed:

• Round Tip — Equal radius in all directions (`lineCap: 'round'`, `lineJoin: 'round'`). Creates smooth, friendly, uniform strokes at all angles.
• Chisel Tip — Oriented at an adjustable slant angle (default 45°). As you drag along the slant direction the stroke is thin; perpendicular to it the stroke expands to maximum width.
• Square Tip — Blocky, flat perpendicular ends (`lineCap: 'square'`, `lineJoin: 'miter'`). Produces modern, structured digital annotations.
• Soft Tip — 3-pass gaussian falloff along the stroke path, eliminating harsh vector boundaries for glowing and ambient markings (Photoshop 0% Hardness).
• Dashed Tip — Cadenced stroke rhythm (`setLineDash`). Ideal for projected future paths, speculative trades, and secondary resistance levels.

Raw pointer events captured by web browsers arrive at 60Hz to 120Hz. During fast mouse sweeps or stylus flicks, consecutive coordinates can be separated by 30px to 60px. If rendered directly with straight line segments, the stroke looks polygonal, jagged, and angular.

Quatick's Pen engine processes coordinates through a two-stage geometric pipeline:

• Centripetal Catmull-Rom Spline — Interpolates smooth curves through all sampled control points, ensuring continuous velocity and tangent continuity without artificial loop overshoot.
• Uniform Arc-Length Resampling — Re-samples points along the spline arc at equal spatial intervals (Δd ≤ 1.8px). This enforces Photoshop's brush spacing model, guaranteeing that rapid mouse movements have the exact same dense, solid pigment coverage as slow movements.

Real artist paintbrushes are made of dozens of natural or synthetic hairs that deposit varying amounts of pigment. Quatick's paintbrush shader extrudes a soft translucent central body flanked by 5 individual micro-filaments. Each filament has slightly varying line thickness, lateral normal offsets, and alpha levels, producing genuine acrylic/oil paintbrush strokes.

When a graphite pencil is dragged across cold-press drawing paper, microscopic graphite flakes catch on the raised paper fibers (the "tooth" of the paper). Our pencil engine combines a fine semi-translucent graphite core with procedural stipple micro-dots scattered along the path using a deterministic hash function. Because the scatter is deterministic based on point coordinates, the texture looks organic and authentic, and never flickers or shifts when the chart is redrawn.

As a wet watercolor stroke dries on paper, surface tension and capillary action push suspended pigment particles to the outer boundary meniscus. When completely dry, this leaves a distinctive darker outline known as the "wet edge". Quatick simulates this with a three-layer shader: a soft translucent body (38% alpha), a concentrated wet core (30% alpha), and two crisp outer boundary rims (62% alpha).

The Pen Tool is engineered for fast, continuous charting. When armed, a floating options toolbar docks at the top center of the chart:

• Stationary Docking — The toolbar remains anchored at y=38px. Moving the pen or drawing anywhere on the canvas never moves or shifts the toolbar.
• Continuous Drawing — You can draw stroke 1, stroke 2, stroke 3, and circle swing highs in immediate succession. The tool stays armed until explicitly closed or Escape is pressed.
• Live Property Switching — Change brush style, tip profile, color, or width at any moment; all subsequent strokes immediately reflect your new settings.

• Fair Value Gap (FVG) Highlighting — Use the Highlighter brush (yellow or cyan, 35% opacity) to mark the gap between Candle 1's high and Candle 3's low. The translucent stroke preserves the inner price action while keeping the imbalance visible.
• Liquidity Pool Sweeps — Use the Pen brush (red or magenta, size 3px) to draw a rapid circle around a false breakout above equal highs, annotating the subsequent trap.
• Market Structure Break (BOS / CHoCH) — Use the Calligraphy brush to sketch dynamic curved trend arrows through swing lows, clearly showing momentum expansion.
• Supply & Demand Heatmaps — Use the Airbrush tool to spray soft support zones beneath ascending trendlines without cluttering the screen with opaque boxes.

Transparency is a key superpower of technical charting. High-opacity strokes (80%–100%) are intended for sharp vectors and labels. Low-opacity strokes (25%–45%) are intended for background region highlighting, ensuring that volume bars, indicator lines, and candlestick shadows remain crisp and readable beneath your drawings.

1. 1
   Select Pen Tool

   Click the Pen Tool icon on the left drawing toolbar (shortcut Alt+P).
2. 2
   Draw Freehand Stroke

   Click and hold the left mouse button (or stylus/touch) anywhere on the chart, draw along your desired curve, and release.
3. 3
   Continuous Multi-Stroke Drawing

   The pen stays armed continuously! Draw as many consecutive annotations as you like across the chart.
4. 4
   Customize in Floating Toolbar

   Use the top-docked Pen Style Popup to switch between 8 Brushes, 5 Tips, adjust size presets (2px–24px), change colors, and adjust nib slant angles.
5. 5
   Reposition or Scale

   Switch to cursor mode and click any drawn stroke to select it. Drag its body to move it or drag bounding-box handles to scale.
6. 6
   Erase or Undo

   Use the Eraser tool to delete a stroke with one click, or press Ctrl+Z to undo.