Document Tools

In addition to multiple pages, a Sketchpad document may contain one or more custom tools—tools that you or someone else has created. Custom tools extend Sketchpad’s fundamental tools to provide new mathematical objects or to provide new ways to construct familiar mathematical objects.

When you create a new custom tool, it becomes part of your document. Use Document Options to rename, reorder and remove custom tools from the active document, and to copy tools from a different open document into the active document.

Organize custom tools you use frequently by storing each collection of related tools in a document of its own. If you use a document’s pages to describe the tools it contains—and give examples of their use—your document becomes a handy “toolkit” that you can share with other people. For example, you might want to make a kit of tools for constructing different centers of a triangle or one for constructing various regular polygons.

When you’re working in a sketch, you can use not only the custom tools located in the document on which you’re working, but also any custom tools contained in other open documents. To work with custom tools contained in a document on your hard drive, open the document so its custom tools become available. Alternately, if you store any documents in the Tool Folder located on your hard drive next to the Sketchpad application, tools from these documents are available whenever you start Sketchpad—even if the documents that contain them are not open.