Præsto — Manual

Updated 2026-08-16

Præsto is a whiteboard that can present: an infinite canvas holding images, videos, websites and text — and a presentation mode in which everyone watching sees exactly what you show.

This manual describes how to use it. It follows the order of the work: sign in, build a board, structure it, share it, present it.

Signing in

Præsto has no open registration. An account comes about in two ways:

• Invitation. The administration of your organisation enters your email address. You receive an email with a link, open it and set your own password. The link is valid for 14 days.
• Self sign-up via Try free for 14 days on the start page. This creates an organisation of your own. Only the confirmation link in the email unlocks it.

After that you sign in at praesto.digitalwart.de with your email and password — via Sign in at the top right of the start page. Once you are signed in, that address takes you straight to your board overview. The start page stays reachable all the same: the Home link in the footer leads back to it at any time.

Forgot your password? The link on the sign-in page sends you a one-time link valid for two hours. For security reasons you always get the same response — even if no account exists for that address.

Too many failed attempts? From the fifth wrong password onwards, Præsto inserts a pause that grows with every further attempt (15 seconds up to 15 minutes). Wait out the time shown; the correct password works again immediately afterwards.

Trying it without an account

The start page offers three ways. None of them requires signing in.

• Vorführung ansehen (view the showing). You enter a talk that runs by itself, as a guest: first the waiting screen, then frame by frame. This is the view your own guests will have later. You may break away and look around at any time; a bar at the top leads back.
• Vortrag starten (start the talk). The same board from the other side — it opens straight into presentation mode. → and ← move on, and you see the speaker notes, the elapsed time and the guest preview.
• Board öffnen (open the board). The same board on the open canvas, to take apart.

The last two give you a throwaway organisation of your own. You can move everything and present it, but you cannot upload anything. After an hour it is removed together with the board.

The overview

After signing in you see your boards as cards with a preview image.

• New board creates a board — more on that below.
• Each card states its visibility (Private or Whole organisation) and how much storage its media occupy.
• The ⧉ button at the top right of a card copies the board — with all content, all files and all speaker notes. The copy is called “… (Copy)”, belongs to you and is private, even if the original was shared. Existing guest links do not apply to it.
• The header states the storage used by the whole organisation.

At the top right you find:

A board is private until you share it — the administration cannot see it either until then.

Creating a board

New board first opens a form. There you decide:

1. Skeleton — a board template that immediately creates a few empty frames, or Empty board. More on that under Templates.
2. Name of the board.
3. Backdrop — the background colour of the canvas.
4. Accent colour.
5. Two fonts — one for headings, one for body text.

The preview shows everything together. Everything is pre-filled with the default design of your organisation: if you do not want to decide anything, just press Enter.

The board only comes into being when you confirm. Cancelling leaves no empty shell behind in the overview.

Moving around the board

The canvas is infinite, the zoom is continuous — from 2 % to 2000 %.

On tablet and phone: one finger pans the view, two fingers zoom — spreading enlarges, pinching shrinks. One finger on an element moves the element. On a phone a board is for viewing; see On a phone.

Images are loaded at the resolution that matches the current display size. As you zoom in, Præsto quietly swaps to a higher level, up to the original file — you do not have to think about it.

Inserting content

The insert bar sits at the bottom centre.

• Media opens the file picker. You can also simply drag files onto the board or paste from the clipboard with ⌘/Ctrl + V — a screenshot then lands right where you are looking.
  • Images are stored without loss; Præsto additionally creates smaller versions for display. Possible are JPEG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, GIF and TIFF, up to 50 MB per image.
  • SVG stays vector and is therefore sharp at any zoom level — the right form for logos and drawings. Up to 5 MB; scripts inside are rejected.
  • PDF is split into pages on upload: each page becomes an image, and they are placed side by side. Up to 100 MB and 50 pages per file; if a document is longer, a message says how many pages were taken.
  • Videos must be web-ready (MP4 or WebM with H.264, VP9 or AV1) — they are not converted. Up to 500 MB.
• Website asks for an address and places the page on the board as a window. The viewing width is adjustable, from a large monitor down to a phone.
• Text creates a text element. Double-click opens it for writing, Esc ends the input, Enter makes a new paragraph. What you can mark up is described under Writing and marking up text.
• Frame opens a menu: pick a format, draw freely, or wrap a frame around the selection. See Frames — the outline.
• Frame template inserts a saved frame including its content.
• Board template creates a whole skeleton of empty frames.

If a frame is currently selected, new elements land in that frame and are scaled to fit it.

Arranging

• Select: click the element. Esc clears the selection.
• Move: drag.
• Resize: drag the handles at the corners. Images and videos keep their aspect ratio, websites can be dragged freely.
• Delete: Del or Backspace.
• Copy, paste, duplicate: ⌘/Ctrl + C, V, D.
• Undo: ⌘/Ctrl + Z, forward with ⌘/Ctrl + Shift + Z. Only your own changes are undone, never those of others.

Several at once

• Shift + click adds an element to the selection or takes it out again.
• Shift + drag on empty space pulls up a selection rectangle. Whatever it touches is selected.
• ⌘/Ctrl + A selects all elements of the board.
• Moving, deleting, copying and duplicating act on the whole selection. Everything travels in one step, keeping its arrangement.

The corner handles for resizing only appear when exactly one element is selected. Scaling several at once is not possible.

Frames can be multi-selected in the same way — but not together with elements: clicking the other kind starts a new selection.

The same applies in the layer list on the right: shift-click or ⌘/Ctrl-click adds a row to the selection.

Snapping

While moving and resizing, edges and centres snap to other elements; a guide shows what to. Inside a frame, margins and grid are added.

The Alt key suspends snapping for as long as it is held.

Layers

The layer list is on the right — everything lying on the board, grouped by frames.

• Change the order by dragging or with the arrows.
• Assign an element to a different frame by drag and drop.
• Selecting and deleting work here as well.

Writing and marking up text

Double-click on a text element opens it for writing. Dragging inside an open box selects text, it does not move the box — to move it, end the input with Esc first.

While writing, the bar above the box applies to the selected passage, not to the whole box:

• B, I and U set bold, italic and underline.
• The colour field colours the selection. That is how a price stands in a different colour from its description without needing two text boxes.
• •— turns the paragraphs into a bulleted list.
• ⇤ ↔ ⇥ align the paragraph the cursor is in.

If the box is merely selected and not being edited, the same buttons apply to the whole box — that is where you set its base colour and alignment.

Esc ends the input. Clicking anywhere on the board does the same.

Font, size and line spacing

These three always apply to the whole box, even while writing. A box holding three paragraphs in three fonts is not a draft, it is an accident.

• The first button in the bar shows the font of the box and opens the choice. At the top are the two fonts of this board — Heading and Body text. Pick one of them and the box stays tied to the board design: set a different house font later and the text follows. Below them are the built-in fonts and every font your organisation has added. Each entry is shown in itself.
• Type the font size freely into the field next to it — any number goes. − and + step by one notch, and the notches grow with the size, because nobody sees two points on a headline. ↑ and ↓ in the field do the same, Esc discards what you are typing.
• ≡ with the number beside it opens the line spacing: five common values to click and the same free field below them. The value is a multiple of the font size, 1.25 is the default.

Size of the text box

A text box grows with its text on its own. You can also draw it yourself:

• The side edges set the width. The height keeps following the content and the font stays as it is — you get a different line break.
• The top or bottom edge sets the height. It then stays fixed: the text aligns inside the box instead of defining it.
• At a corner, the ⤡ switch at the end of the bar decides:
  • Off: the box changes its size, the font stays put.
  • On: the font grows and shrinks with it and the box keeps its aspect ratio — the whole block of text gets bigger, not the frame around it.

It is the same switch as ⤢ Content too on a frame and the same question: are you drawing a frame or the thing inside it. It remembers your choice in the browser.

• With a fixed height, three more buttons appear in the bar: text at the top, middle or bottom of the box. Text longer than the box is cut off.
• ↕ in the bar switches between fixed and growing height.

Frames — the outline

Frames are named sections of the board. They are at the same time your presentation order: in a presentation you travel from frame to frame.

Creating: press Frame in the insert bar. A menu opens with three ways:

• Format — five tiles: 16:9 (Widescreen), 4:3 (Classic), 1:1 (Square), 4:5 (Post) and 9:16 (Story). The frame appears centred in your view, as large as it fits there. Pick the format of your target medium — it decides how the frame looks later in the talk or in an export, not the width of whoever's browser window happens to be open.
• Draw freely — you then drag the frame directly on the board. Esc cancels.
• Around selection — wraps a frame around whatever is currently selected, with a little air around it. With nothing selected the entry is greyed out.

The same button sits as a + in the header of the frame list.

The frame list appears on the left:

• Click zooms to the frame.
• Double-click renames it.
• Drag changes the order: pick up the row and drop it where it belongs. Without a mouse, Alt+↑ and Alt+↓ do the same.

On the board you grab a frame by its label or by any of its four edges — which is why nested frames can still be grabbed individually.

Whatever lies completely inside a frame travels with it when it moves — including frames inside it.

Resizing: frame or section

When resizing you have a choice. The frame options hold the switch ⤢ Content too:

• Off (default): only the frame changes, the content stays put. You drag freely in both directions.
• On: the content grows and shrinks with it — images, text including font size, and nested frames. In doing so the aspect ratio of the frame locks, because only a single scale leaves the aspect ratios of your elements untouched.

The same switch is called ⤡ on a text box and decides there whether the font grows along when you drag a corner.

Font sizes grow continuously; the field shows them rounded. That is why, after enlarging and shrinking several times, you find exactly the sizes you started with.

The switch remembers your choice in the browser and applies to all frames. It is your setting: whoever else works on the board is unaffected.

Styling frames

When a frame is selected, its options appear:

• Fill: fill colour.
• Border: width and colour.
• Grid: inner margin, columns and rows.

A styled frame — with a fill or a border — is content and is shown to guests as well. An unstyled frame remains pure authoring structure and is invisible during a presentation.

The grid is everywhere set to automatic: margin, columns and rows are derived from the size of the frame and grow with it when scaling. It only becomes visible while something is being moved inside it; during a presentation it is gone. The grid does not arrange anything by itself — it is a guide, not a layout machine.

Speaker notes

For every frame you can note what you want to say about it. In the frame list the ✎ button opens a field below the frame; you write directly into it and it saves by itself. Frames with a note are recognisable by the coloured button.

During a talk the note for the current frame is at the bottom left — together with the elapsed time and the name of the next frame.

Notes are only seen by people who may edit the board. They are not part of the board content and are never transmitted to guests — not even during a presentation.

Appearance

Board design

The ◐ button at the top right opens the design of the board: backdrop, six house colours and two fonts. The house colours then come first in every colour picker, the two fonts at the top of every text box. One button adopts the default design of the organisation.

The styling belongs to the board. If the administration later changes the default design of the organisation, existing boards stay as they are.

Default design of the organisation

Design in the overview sets what new boards start with: backdrop, six house colours and both fonts. Only the administration may change this.

The same dialog holds the logo of the organisation. It appears on the waiting screen that guests see before a presentation starts — together with backdrop, accent colour and font from here. SVG, PNG or WebP, at most 512 KB; best cut out with a transparent background, and as SVG additionally sharp at any size. Only the administration may set and remove it.

Fonts

Every member may fetch a family from Google Fonts in the same dialog. It is downloaded once, then lives on our own server and is available in every font selector of this organisation — in the board design, in every single text box, and for guests too. Only the administration may remove it.

Your own house font is added via Upload your own font file: WOFF2, OTF or TTF, at most 8 MB per file. Præsto suggests name, weight and cut from the file name — all three remain editable. For regular and bold you upload one file each; under the same name they make up one font, and the font selector shows them as a single entry.

Before uploading you confirm that the licence of the font permits embedding on a web server. That is not a formality: many purchased fonts do not permit exactly that, and Præsto cannot check it itself.

Templates

There are two kinds, and they do different things: a frame template brings a finished frame with everything inside it. A board template brings the skeleton of a whole board — empty frames, nothing else.

Both come in three scopes:

Frame templates

A finished, styled frame can be saved together with its elements and inserted again on any other board.

Saving: select the frame → Save as template in the frame options.

Inserting: Frame template in the insert bar.

Frame templates are complete copies, down to the files. If the original board is deleted, the template remains and keeps working. In exchange, every template and every insertion occupies storage of its own.

The selection shows a floor plan instead of a preview image — the media of a template may come from an organisation you are not allowed to see.

Board templates

A board template is a skeleton: a series of empty frames in a fixed arrangement and order — title, agenda, three topics, questions. What lies inside the frames is never part of it; a board template occupies no storage.

Præsto ships a few: Talk, Client meeting, Workshop, Teaching unit, Moodboard and Large canvas.

Inserting: when creating a board, under Skeleton, or later via Board template in the insert bar. On a board that already has frames, the skeleton goes to the right of them and at the end of the presentation order.

Creating your own — two ways, both via Board template in the insert bar:

• From this board takes over the frames of the open board. You choose individually what comes along: the names of the frames, the styling (background, border, margins, grid) and the speaker notes. The content of the frames stays out in any case.
• Compose a new one builds a skeleton without a board: number of frames, arrangement in one row or in columns, aspect ratio and the labels.

The floor plan in the selection numbers the frames — the number is the order in which you will later present through them.

The frame names of the shipped templates are created in the language you have set when inserting them. They are content from then on, and do not change with the interface language.

Two people on the same board

Several people can work on a board at the same time.

• The cursors of the others are visible with names.
• The top right shows who is currently there.
• Changes appear immediately for everyone. If two people work on the same element, the changes are merged field by field.
• The dot next to the board name shows the connection state.

One exception: two people typing in the same text element at the same time overwrite each other. Agree briefly with each other about texts.

History — earlier states

The ↺ button at the top right opens the history of the board. Præsto captures what the board looks like every quarter of an hour, as long as it is being worked on.

The times are on the left, on the right you see the chosen state as a preview. Restore this state brings it back — after a confirmation, and for everyone involved at once.

The state before restoring is saved beforehand. A wrong move can therefore be taken back just as well.

This is not a second undo: ⌘/Ctrl + Z takes back individual steps of your current session, the history answers “that was still there yesterday”.

Older states are thinned out over time — from today every one is kept, after that one per day, and after a month none.

Sharing

Share at the top right opens the rights of the board.

To people and to the organisation

• Visibility: private, or for the whole organisation.
• Add person: unlock individual members specifically.

Anyone who may see a board may also edit it. Anyone who should only watch gets a guest link.

Guest links

Create link gives you an address that works without an account. Guests state their name before entering and get an identity of their own with their own cursor colour — even if several share the same link. Guests can change nothing.

When creating it you choose the mode:

With the two guided modes the content is not in the guest's browser at all before the start — the server only hands it out once the presentation begins.

The waiting screen

What a guided guest sees until the start carries the appearance of your organisation: backdrop, accent colour, font and logo from the default design. Below it, discreetly, is a note that Præsto by Digitalwart is behind it.

When creating a link you can add a greeting — a sentence such as “Kickoff Example Ltd — we start at 2 pm”. It belongs to the link, not to the board: the same board may show a different sentence in the morning than in the afternoon. For links already issued it can be changed in the field below the entry.

View waiting screen shows you in advance what the guest will see. In free viewing there is no waiting screen — there the guest sees the board immediately, and a greeting would go unread.

Worth knowing: what has been shown has been shown. Ending the presentation hides the board at the guest's end, but does not take it back. Anyone who really wants to close access revokes the link — via the cross next to the entry.

Presenting

Present at the top right starts the talk. Frames are the prerequisite: they are the order.

In the bar along the bottom edge:

Pointing

During the talk your mouse pointer becomes a glowing dot for everyone — without a name tag, so that it points at the content and not at itself. It is there from the start.

The Z key hides and shows it again; the same button is in the bar. Hidden means hidden: no position is transmitted at all then. Five colours are available, and your browser remembers the last one for the next talk.

What is transmitted is the active frame, not your view. Every guest fits it completely into their own window — same content, same margins, regardless of screen size and window format. Frame changes travel as an animation for everyone, not as a jump.

During the talk nothing is editable, and the frame structure is invisible to guests (except for styled frames).

Preview: a second view at the bottom right shows you what a guest is currently seeing, including their aspect ratio.

Notes: at the bottom left are your speaker note for the current frame, the time since the start and the name of the next frame. Only you see this.

Embedded websites can be operated directly during the talk — scrolling and clicking without an intermediate step. The scroll position reaches all viewers; what you click inside the page they do not see.

Joining as a guest

The guest opens the link, enters their name and is in. A bar shows who is presenting. Anyone allowed to break away and look around freely also finds the way back into the guided view there.

On a phone

On a phone a board opens for viewing. The tool bars stay away, and a note at the bottom reads Viewing only on this screen.

That is a recommendation, not a lock: Edit anyway unlocks the tools. It will not be comfortable — the frame list and the layer list have no room on a narrow screen, and the bars at the object are too fine for a finger. To build a board, use a larger screen.

What works well on a phone:

• Viewing and reading. The board opens on the first frame instead of the whole surface — everything else would be too small.
• Frame by frame with the ‹ and › buttons at the bottom right. In between, it says where you are.
• Following a presentation. As a guest you see exactly the presenter's view; nothing needs to be set up.
• Zooming and panning with two fingers and one finger respectively.

Administering the organisation

Organisation in the overview — visible to everyone, editable by the administration.

• Add person: enter the email address and role. The person receives an invitation and sets their own password; until then they appear as invited in the list and can be withdrawn there. If sending the mail fails, the dialog shows the link for passing on.
• Roles:
  • Administration — add and remove people, set roles, rename the organisation, set the default design, remove fonts.
  • Member — create, edit, share and present boards.
• Change the name of the organisation.

The administration cannot see other people's private boards either. If a person is removed, their boards pass to the administrator who removed them — so that nothing is orphaned.

An account belongs to a person and can be part of several organisations. Switching happens at the top right, without signing in again.

Account and password

The button with your name opens your account.

Language is right at the top: Deutsch or English. The choice applies immediately and is remembered on the account — so it travels to every device you sign in on. The whole interface is translated, as are the messages from the server, the emails from Præsto and this manual.

Without signing in, the browser decides: anyone set to German gets the sign-in screen in German. The switch is there as well, below the form, and on the joining screen for guests.

What you have already written stays as it is — board names, frame names and text are content and are never translated along. The frames created by a shipped board template also keep the language in which you inserted them.

Change password requires the current password and a new one with at least ten characters. Afterwards all other sessions of your account are ended — the device you are sitting at stays signed in.

Storage and licence

Every plan has a limit for people and for storage.

• Storage counts all resolution levels of an image, not only the original file — up to five versions of every image lie on the disk. The media of templates count as well.
• Open invitations count towards the people.
• If you do not see all boards of your organisation, the header states how much lies in the remaining boards.

When the licence expires, Præsto only blocks creating — new boards, uploads, templates, fonts, people. Existing boards remain readable, editable and presentable. Nothing is ever deleted automatically.

Reminders go to the administration before expiry. Invoicing is done manually; for a renewal or a larger plan, write to praesto@digitalwart.de.

Keyboard shortcuts

When something does not work

The board stays empty. Check the connection dot next to the board name. Reloading the page restores the connection; nothing is lost in the process.

A bar at the top says “Præsto has been updated”. This tab has been open since an update and is still running the old version. Press Reload — until you do, inserting content can fail silently. Præsto does not reload on its own so that it never happens to you mid-talk.

A video does not play. Præsto does not convert videos. Upload it as MP4 (H.264) or WebM. Videos in H.265/HEVC or ProRes — what cameras and editing programs like to produce — are rejected at upload rather than staying black later.

A photo from the iPhone is not accepted. It is a HEIC file. On the device, go to Settings → Camera → Formats and switch to Most Compatible, or export the image as JPEG.

The text in the PDF cannot be selected. The pages lie on the board as images. Text that should stay selectable or searchable belongs in a text element.

A website does not appear. Some pages forbid being embedded. Nothing can be done about that — take a screenshot.

The embedded page scrolls into nothing. The window height set is larger than the page itself. Set it smaller.

An upload is rejected. Either the storage limit of the plan is reached, or the licence has expired — the message says which of the two.

An element under a frame cannot be grabbed. Deselect the frame first (Esc).

The frame can only be dragged proportionally. The switch ⤢ Content too is on. Switch it off and you can drag freely again.

Several elements cannot be scaled together. The corner handles only appear with exactly one element selected. Moving, deleting and duplicating do work for the whole selection.

Something deleted is really gone. ⌘/Ctrl + Z helps within the same session; after that the way leads through the history (button ↺).

Still open. Rotation, comments and PDF export do not exist yet.

Questions not answered here go to praesto@digitalwart.de.