xsheet-mark

A transparent always-on-top drawing overlay for Windows. Write pen or mouse annotations on top of any running app; the overlay never interrupts the app underneath from receiving keyboard and pointer input.

日本語版: README.ja.md

What it's good for

• Spotting in a video editor — scrub playback in Premiere / DaVinci Resolve / VLC etc., draw timing marks on top, export per-image PSD
• Annotating a reference image — drop a still or sheet onto the canvas, mark it up, export
• Animation timesheet work (the original use case) — load PSD timesheets, write pen notes, export PSD with annotations as a new top layer while original layers are preserved
• Markup on any other app — slide decks, browser tabs, internal tools — the overlay stays above and passes keyboard through

Features

• Transparent always-on-top overlay that doesn't steal keyboard or pointer input from the app below
• Pen tablet support — pressure-sensitive ink via Windows Ink (tested on HUION; Wacom-compatible)
• Infinite canvas — drop any number of images side-by-side, pan and zoom freely
• 6 ink colors, 3 widths, point-based eraser; pen and eraser each remember their own width
• Lock overlay (click-through) — flip the overlay into a see-but-don't-touch layer so clicks and pen input pass through to the app below while your strokes stay visible. Unlock from the taskbar thumbnail button.
• Undo / Redo for strokes, image drops, image moves, and canvas clears
• Separate opacity sliders for the whole window and for loaded images
• Image formats — PSD, PSB, JPG, PNG, BMP, GIF, TIFF, TGA
• PSD export, two modes:
  • 💾 per image — each loaded image saves as its own PSD. PSD inputs preserve original layer structure and get an xsheet-mark ink layer added on top; other formats get a fresh PSD with image + ink
  • 📷 viewport capture — whatever is currently visible saves as a single PSD with a transparent background, for compositing the notes back into other work
• Move images, annotations follow — strokes drawn on an image travel with it when you drag
• Reset canvas in one click; undoable
• Remembers window size, position, and opacity between sessions
• Bilingual UI — Japanese / English, auto-detected from Windows display language

System requirements

• Windows 10 or 11 (64-bit)
• Pen tablet with Windows Ink enabled in the driver settings for pressure sensitivity (mouse works without it)

Getting started

1. Download xsheet-mark-v*.zip from Releases
2. Extract — you get an xsheet-mark/ folder containing XsheetMark.exe and its WPF native DLLs
3. Run XsheetMark.exe from inside that folder (it needs its sibling DLLs)
4. Drop images onto the window (or start drawing on the empty canvas), annotate, export with 💾 or 📷

Usage

Window chrome

• Top black bar — drag to move the window
• — (minimize) — collapses to the taskbar; click the taskbar icon to restore
• ✕ (close) — quit the app
• Window edges — grab to resize (cursor changes near each edge)
• Opacity panel (top-right) — two sliders:
  • Window (0.2 – 1.0): see through the whole overlay to the app underneath
  • Image (0.0 – 1.0): fade all loaded images uniformly (ink stays fully visible)

Toolbar (left side)

Icon	Action
↶	Undo the last stroke / erase / image drop / image move / reset
↷	Redo
✎	Pen
⌫	Eraser (removes partial strokes; size follows the line-width selector)
✥	Move — drag an image to reposition it; strokes on the image follow
●	Current ink color — long-press (~0.35 s) to open the color picker (black / white / red / blue / green / yellow)
▬	Line width — pen and eraser remember their own
⛶	Fit all images to the window
💾	Export each image as its own PSD
📷	Capture the current viewport as a single PSD (transparent background)
🔒	Lock overlay — turns the window click-through so input falls to the app below. See Lock overlay
🗑	Clear the canvas (undoable)

Canvas controls

• Wheel — zoom in/out centered on the cursor
• Middle-drag or right-drag — pan the canvas
• Drop image files anywhere on the window to load them
• You can draw without loading any image — the whole canvas is ink-ready from the start

Exporting

Two buttons, two intents:

• 💾 Export — one PSD per image on the canvas, named <source-name>-marked.psd. PSD inputs keep their original layer structure; the embedded thumbnail and composite preview ("Maximize Compatibility" payload) are regenerated so file-browser previews show the annotated version. When the canvas has no images, this button falls back to a single viewport-sized PSD.
• 📷 Capture — one viewport-sized PSD regardless of images, with a transparent background, for overlay-annotation workflows where the marks will be composited over other content.

Both write to a folder you pick, and file-name collisions get a numeric suffix (-2, -3, ...).

Lock overlay (click-through)

Click 🔒 in the toolbar to put the overlay into click-through mode. Your drawings stay on screen, but clicks and pen input pass through to the app underneath — useful when you want to keep notes visible while resuming work in the app below without closing the overlay.

Because the overlay no longer accepts clicks in this mode, you unlock it from outside the window:

• Hover the xsheet-mark icon in the taskbar until the thumbnail preview appears, then click the 🔓 button below the thumbnail.

The border turns red while locked so you can tell at a glance. The first time you enable click-through the app shows a one-time warning explaining how to unlock; you can suppress it with the checkbox.

Pen pressure

Enable "Windows Ink" in your tablet driver's settings. WPF reads pressure via the Windows Ink / Real-Time Stylus stack; WinTab-only configurations will not pass pressure data through.

License

MIT — see LICENSE. Third-party components and their licenses are listed in NOTICE.