Installation

To use the tldraw SDK, first install the tldraw package:

npm install tldraw

Now import and use the Tldraw component inside of any React component. You will need React 18 or 19.

import { Tldraw } from 'tldraw'
import 'tldraw/tldraw.css'

export default function () {
	return (
		<div style={{ position: 'fixed', inset: 0 }}>
			<Tldraw />
		</div>
	)
}

Wrapper

The Tldraw component must be wrapped in a parent container with an explicit size. Its height and width are set to 100%, so it will fill its parent container.

Accessing the editor

Use the onMount prop to access the Editor instance when it's ready:

function App() {
	return (
		<div style={{ position: 'fixed', inset: 0 }}>
			<Tldraw
				onMount={(editor) => {
					// Do something with the editor
					editor.selectAll()
				}}
			/>
		</div>
	)
}

The callback can return a cleanup function that runs when the editor unmounts.

CSS

In addition to the Tldraw component itself, you should also import the tldraw.css file from the tldraw package.

import 'tldraw/tldraw.css'

You can alternatively import this file inside of another CSS file using the @import syntax.

@import url('tldraw/tldraw.css');

If you'd like to deeply change the way that tldraw looks, you can copy the tldraw.css file into a new CSS file, make your changes, and import that instead.

Fonts

The tldraw SDK bundles its own fonts for shapes: IBM Plex (Sans, Serif, Mono) and Shantell Sans (for draw-style text). These are loaded automatically from the CDN or self-hosted static assets.

The tldraw UI will inherit its font family. You can set this to any font you like. For example, to use Inter:

@import url('https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Inter:wght@500;700&display=swap');

.tl-container {
	font-family: 'Inter', sans-serif;
}

HTML

If you're using the Tldraw component in a full-screen app, update your index.html's meta viewport element as shown below.

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1, viewport-fit=cover" />

Without these viewport options, some features like safe area positioning won't work correctly.

License

If you have a license key, you can pass your key to the licenseKey prop.

<Tldraw licenseKey={YOUR_LICENSE_KEY} />

To learn more about the license and license key, visit our pricing page.

Static assets

To use the Tldraw component, the app must be able to find certain assets. These are contained in the embed-icons, fonts, icons, and translations folders. We offer a few different ways of making these assets available to your app.

Using a bundler

If you're using a bundler like webpack or rollup, you can import the assets directly from the @tldraw/assets package. Your bundler will copy the assets with your bundle and insert the correct URLs in their place.

There are three options:

  • import {getAssetUrlsByImport} from '@tldraw/assets/imports': import asset files using import statements. You'll need to configure your bundler to treat imports of .svg, .png, .json, and .woff2 files as external assets.
  • import {getAssetUrlsByImport} from '@tldraw/assets/imports.vite': import asset files, appending ?url to the asset path. This works correctly with vite without any extra configuration needed.
  • import {getAssetUrlsByMetaUrl} from '@tldraw/assets/urls': get asset urls using new URL(path, import.meta.url). This is a standards-based approach that works natively in most modern browsers & bundlers.

Call the function, and pass the resulting assetUrls into the Tldraw component:

import { getAssetUrlsByMetaUrl } from '@tldraw/assets/urls'

const assetUrls = getAssetUrlsByMetaUrl()

<Tldraw assetUrls={assetUrls} />

Using a public CDN

By default, we serve these assets from a public CDN. This works without configuration and is a good starting point.

If you would like to customize some of the assets you can pass the customizations to our Tldraw component. For example, to use a custom icon for the hand tool you can do the following:

const assetUrls = {
    icons: {
        'tool-hand': './custom-tool-hand.svg',
    },
}

<Tldraw assetUrls={assetUrls} />

This will use the custom icon for the hand tool and the default assets for everything else.

Self-hosting assets

You can also host these assets yourself:

  1. Download the embed-icons, fonts, icons, and translations folders from the assets folder of the tldraw repository.
  2. Place the folders in your project's public path.
  3. Pass assetUrls prop to our <Tldraw/> component to let the component know where the assets live.

You can use our getAssetUrls helper function from the @tldraw/assets package to generate these urls for you.

import { getAssetUrls } from '@tldraw/assets/selfHosted'

const assetUrls = getAssetUrls()

<Tldraw assetUrls={assetUrls} />

While these files must be available, you can overwrite the individual files: for example, by placing different icons under the same name or modifying / adding translations.

If you use a CDN for hosting these files you can specify the base url of your assets. To recreate the above option of serving the assets from our CDN you would do the following:

import { getDefaultCdnBaseUrl } from 'tldraw'

const assetUrls = getAssetUrls({
	baseUrl: getDefaultCdnBaseUrl(),
})

Subcomponents

The Tldraw component combines two lower-level components: TldrawEditor and TldrawUi. If you want more granular control, you can use those lower-level components directly. See the exploded example for reference.

Customizing components

You can customize the appearance of the tldraw editor and UI using the Tldraw (or TldrawEditor) component's components prop. This prop accepts a TLComponents object, which combines TLEditorComponents (canvas-level components like cursors, selection, and grid) with TLUiComponents (UI elements like toolbar, menus, and panels).

import { TLComponents } from 'tldraw'

const components: TLComponents = {
	// Editor components
	Background: YourCustomBackground,
	Cursor: YourCustomCursor,
	Grid: YourCustomGrid,
	SelectionForeground: YourCustomSelectionForeground,
	SnapIndicator: YourCustomSnapIndicator,

	// UI components
	Toolbar: YourCustomToolbar,
	MainMenu: YourCustomMainMenu,
	StylePanel: YourCustomStylePanel,
	ContextMenu: YourCustomContextMenu,
}

<Tldraw components={components} />

See the TLEditorComponents and TLUiComponents type definitions for the complete list of customizable components.

Versioning

The tldraw SDK does not follow semantic versioning. To learn more, read about how we do release versioning.

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