Help

Calque lays an image over your paper, see-through, so you can trace it.

Trace with the camera

Put your phone 20 to 40 cm (8 to 16 in) above the paper, on an upturned glass or a stack of books. It must not move.
Pick a photo, a file or one of the templates.
Place the image with your finger, anywhere on the screen. Drag to move it, pinch to resize it, twist with two fingers to rotate it. Set the opacity.
Tap Lock. The image and the camera freeze and the screen stays on. Draw while looking at the screen.
To unlock, press and hold the button at the bottom of the screen.

At real size

Tap Real size, drag the four corners onto the corners of your paper, then pick its format (A4, A5, A3, US Letter) and orientation. The image takes its true size in centimeters and the grid squares are 1 cm. You can set the width by half a centimeter. If the paper or the phone moves, place the corners again.

Lightbox

No camera needed. Lay thin paper right on the screen, on an iPad especially, lock, and trace through. The screen goes to full brightness and returns to your setting when you leave.

Your own images

On the home screen, A photo opens your library and A file takes PNG, JPEG and HEIC images, PDFs and SVG drawings. For a PDF with several pages, you pick the page.
When an image is copied, the Paste the copied image button shows up.
From Files, Mail or Safari, you can also share an image or a PDF to Calque.
Everything you import is kept in My tracings, on your device. Press and hold a tracing to delete it.

Learn

To learn to draw without tracing, you draw the same picture six times, with less and less help. The picture fades, shows up only now and then, leaves the grid, then leaves the paper and stays small at the top of the screen. At the end it comes back over your drawing so you can see the gap. Take a new sheet at each step.

Other tools

Mirror flips the image, for a transfer for instance.
Grid adds squares over the image to keep proportions.
Blink hides the image now and then so you can see your lines.
Light turns on the phone’s flash to light the paper.

Something wrong?

The camera doesn’t show: open Settings, then Calque, and allow Camera. The lightbox works without the camera.
The image is blurry or dark: turn on the light, move the phone a little further, then lock once the image is sharp.
Your lines drift: the phone moved, or you’re looking at the screen at an angle. Steady the phone and look at the screen straight on.

Contact

A question, an idea, a bug? Write to sagnier.jeremy@gmail.com.