Drawing View

In This Topic

The drawing view is the main center pane of MyDraw. This is the area where the project you are currently working on is shown, and where you will manipulate shapes, colors, and text. There are optional rulers on the top and left side of the drawing area, and a status bar at the bottom, with the ability to add additional pages to the current project. The drawing area can be right-clicked for a context menu at any time.

To help you position shapes more precisely, it shows a grid and rulers by default. The view also aids you by providing snapping behavior to grids, rulers, and guidelines.

Guidelines are vertical or horizontal lines you can use to align shapes to.Dragging the horizontal or vertical ruler toward the drawing creates a guideline. The guideline can be centered automatically by using the Center in Page for more precious results. The command is accessible by right click on the drawing view.

You can show and hide different elements of the drawing view as well as to control its zooming mode through the View tab page of MyDraw's ribbon:

Show Ribbon Group

The Show ribbon group toggles the visibility of the different elements such as grid, guidelines, ports, rulers, etc. The following image illustrates the elements you can show or hide using the check boxes of the Show ribbon group:

You can use the Splitter collapse buttons to collapse and expand the splitter pane and the library. MyDraw saves these settings, so the splitter positions you set will be applied again the next time you start MyDraw.

Zoom Ribbon Group

The Zoom ribbon group lets you change the zoom mode of the drawing view to one of the following:

Normal: in this mode the drawing view zoom factor is not automatically calculated
Fit to Page: the drawing view is automatically zoomed in or our so that a whole page is shown in the available area
Fit to Width: the drawing view is zoomed so that the whole width of the current page is visible
Fit to Height: the drawing view is zoomed so that the whole height if the current page is visible

You can use the Zoom In and Zoom Out buttons to zoom in and out the drawing view respectively. Alternatively you can use the mouse wheel while holding with the Ctrl keyboard button or the following keyboard shortcuts:

Zoom In: Ctrl + "+"
Zoom Out: Ctrl + "-"
Zoom to 100%: Ctrl + "0"

The keyboard shortcuts for zooming are identical to those of most modern web browsers, which makes them easy to remember.

Settings Ribbon Group

The Settings ribbon group contains 5 buttons. When clicked each of them displays a dialog for editing the properties of the object it's associated with:

Page: edits the properties of the active page. For more information check out the Page Settings topic.
Grid and Rulers: edits the properties of the grid and the rulers.
Routing: configures the routing manager and the routing settings.
Line Jumps: edits the line jumps settings.
Print Layout: edits the print layout settings.
Drawing Settings: configures the settings of the whole drawing view, for example the appearance of the selection, whether to center selection on zoom, the copy/paste offset, the trackers appearance and many more.