Moving Around the Canvas
Zoom in on fiddly details, pan across a busy scene, and snap back to the whole slide in one click.
A scene opens showing the whole slide, edge to edge — the view Berdee calls Fit. That is the right view for most of the work, because it is the view your students get. But some jobs need a closer look: nudging a hotspot onto the exact leaf of a diagram, checking that two labels really do line up, reading a caption you set at 12pt.
So you can zoom and pan the canvas, and get back to Fit whenever you want.
The zoom controls
A small cluster floats in the bottom-right corner of the canvas, quiet enough to ignore until you want it:
- − zooms out one step
- The percentage in the middle tells you where you are. 100% means the whole scene is on screen, so 200% is twice as big as Fit, not twice life size.
- + zooms in one step
- Fit puts the whole scene back on screen
The steps run 25%, 50%, 75%, 100%, 125%, 150%, 200%, 300%, 400%. The − and + buttons grey out when you reach either end.
From the keyboard
- ⌘ + (Mac) or Ctrl + (Windows, Chromebook) — zoom in
- ⌘ − or Ctrl − — zoom out
- ⌘ 0 or Ctrl 0 — fit the whole scene on screen
These step aside while you are typing, so ⌘ 0 inside a text box never moves the canvas out from under the words you are writing. Space does the same: with your cursor in a field or on a button it types a space instead of arming the pan.
The full list of everything the editor listens for is in Keyboard Shortcuts.
With a trackpad or mouse
- Pinch on a trackpad — zooms toward wherever your pointer is, so you can aim at the corner you care about instead of zooming to the middle and then dragging. Holding Ctrl and scrolling does the same thing.
- Two-finger scroll (or a mouse wheel) moves the canvas up and down.
- Shift + scroll moves it side to side.
- Hold Space and drag grabs the canvas and moves it in any direction. The cursor turns into a hand so you can see the gesture is armed; let go of Space to go back to selecting and dragging widgets.
Scrolling only moves the canvas when there is somewhere to move to. At Fit the whole scene is already on screen, so nothing shifts — that is expected, not a stuck canvas.
Each scene starts at Fit
Switch to another scene and the view resets to Fit. That is deliberate: a new scene is a new picture, and the most useful first look at it is the one your students get. Zoom back in if you need to.
Dropping an image while zoomed
Dragging a picture from your desktop onto the canvas drops it exactly where you let go, whatever the zoom — so you can zoom into a crowded corner and place an image precisely there. See Add images by dropping or pasting.
A few habits worth having
- Check your work at Fit before you preview. If a scene reads well at 100%, it reads well on a student's screen.
- Zoom in for alignment, not for design decisions. Text that only looks right at 300% will look wrong to the class. For lining several widgets up exactly, Aligning and Distributing Widgets is faster and more reliable than the eye.
- Space-drag beats scrolling when you are moving a long way across a zoomed-in scene.