BroDraw

BroDraw - Turn your browser into a sketch pad

BroDraw turns any web page into a canvas. Draw, highlight, screenshot, annotate and save - all directly in the browser. No app switch. No cloud. No account.

Why BroDraw?

• Everything is local. No web service is contacted, no data leaves your machine. AI runs on-device.
• No account. Just install and use.
• 15 languages. German, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Turkish, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Arabic, Swedish.
• Open source.

Features

Drawing

• Pen with pressure sensitivity (tablet-pen)
• Highlighter with smart text-height detection
• Pixel eraser
• Geometric shapes: line, arrow, rectangle, ellipse - in many variants (dashed, dotted, double, wavy, jagged, polygon, star, gear, cloud, ...)
• Text with bold/italic/underline/strikethrough, font families, marker background, alignment
• 200+ stickers and emojis
• Step markers (1, 2, 3, ...)
• Pixelate / redact
• 9 preset colors + 6 custom slots + native eyedropper

Screenshot

• Rectangle selection with adjustable edges
• Lasso selection (free-form)
• Direct to clipboard or saved as a slot

Image import

• Paste from clipboard (Ctrl+V)
• Drag-and-drop from desktop or web page
• Move, scale, edit images with corner handles

Save and export

• PNG with transparency
• JPG (adjustable quality)
• PDF (single page, scaled to fit)
• Native "Save As" dialog

Slots (multi-clipboard)

• Up to 5 slots at the same time
• Every screenshot lands in a new slot automatically
• Hover over a slot for a large preview
• Right-click slot: Crop, OCR, Effects, Auto-Blur, Smart-Crop, BG-Remove

AI tools (local, no cloud)

• OCR - extract text from images via Tesseract.js (German + English)
• Auto-blur sensitive data - automatically detects email, phone, credit card, IBAN, IP address, SSN via OCR + regex and blurs them
• Smart-Crop - crops to the most interesting region of the image
• Background removal - extracts the main subject via U²-Net (5 MB on-device ML model)

PDF editor

• Built-in PDF viewer with annotations OVER the page
• Text layer for selecting / copying PDF text
• OCR on PDF pages

Reader mode

• Mozilla Readability extracts the main content of a web page
• Clean, readable view
• Print directly or save as PDF

Image effects

• Brightness, contrast, saturation, sharpness
• Black-and-white, sepia, vintage, invert
• Per-slot application

Layer system

• Up to 3 drawing layers
• Toggle visibility per layer
• Reorderable
• "Bake" function for background layer

Sharing

• Share annotations as a link (compressed in URL, no server)

Gallery

• Side panel with all slots as large cards

Keyboard shortcuts

• Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y - Undo / Redo
• Ctrl+V - Paste image from clipboard
• Esc - Cancel current action
• P/H/E/L/A/R/O/T - Direct tool selection
• Shift - Axis snap (line), square (rectangle), circle (ellipse), 45-degree snap (highlighter)

Privacy

BroDraw sends NOTHING to the internet. No telemetry, no crash reports, no analytics. All features - including OCR and AI - run fully locally in your browser.

The only network connection happens when downloading the OCR language data (Tesseract tessdata from projectnaptha.com) on first OCR usage. The add-on itself contacts no servers of its own.

Permissions

• activeTab - draw on the current page
• scripting - inject toolbar into the page
• clipboardWrite/Read - Ctrl+V paste + screenshot to clipboard
• downloads - save as PNG/JPG/PDF
• storage - remember tool settings (color, stroke width, etc.)
• <all_urls> - so BroDraw works on any page (including http:// and file:// for local PDFs)

License

BroDraw is open-source software under GPL-3.0-or-later. Copyright (C) 2026 Littau Consulting.

All third-party libraries used (Tesseract.js, PDF.js, jsPDF, U²-Net, ONNX Runtime Web, Mozilla Readability) are commercially-compatible licensed (Apache-2.0 / MIT).

Publisher

Littau Consulting Münsterstraße 261, 40470 Düsseldorf, Germany E-mail: brodraw@littauconsulting.de

Known limitations

• BroDraw cannot activate on about:, chrome: and some moz-extension:// pages (browser limitation).
• Screenshots via tabs.captureVisibleTab only capture the visible viewport area.