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Pencil is an animation/drawing software for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. It lets you create traditional hand-drawn animation (cartoon) using both bitmap and vector graphics. Pencil is free and open source.

Why Pencil?

I have always loved animation. As a child, I tried to make some animation by drawing in notebooks but the result was somewhat unsatisfactory. Nowadays, computers make animation much easier. However, there is surprisingly almost no free cross-platform software for traditional animation.
I was lucky to find "Pencil Planner" by Patrick Corrieri, a little programme for pencil tests. I decided to improve it and use it as a basis to build a bitmap/vector animation program.

Pencil is not intended to mimick web-oriented vector-based animation software such as Flash. Its main purpose is to make traditional animation. Neither does it try to rival commercial software targetting the professional animation sector. Pencil is intended to be a simple programme enabling anyone to make 2D animation.

Features:

· Timeline (create, move, shift and delete keys, edit timeline length and size[zoom])
· Real-time timeline scrubbing and playback with adjustable fps and looping
· Basic drawing tools (pencil, eraser, color, width, clear screen)
· Static background layer
· Onion skinning
· Save/Load
· Image import
· Copy/Paste/Undo/Redo
· Export to Image Sequence
· Export to Movie
· Export X-Sheet
· Basic sound playback
· Hotkeys

Attention Windows users:

* The movie export function has not been implemented yet (only works on the Mac). At the moment (0.4.4b) the Windows version can only export frames and Flash files. Any help would be appreciated.