Canvas

The canvas is the center zone of the editor where your artwork appears. What you see and manipulate depends on the view: a whole page with all its panels (page view) or a single panel with its layers, speech bubbles, and hotspots (panel view).

Canvas toolbar

Across the top of the canvas:

• Format selector — the frame you're designing for. The dropdown lists the work's supported page formats (chosen at creation and editable in Work Properties → Output; works without a stored selection see all formats). Frames range from Mobile Portrait (375×667), Tablet Portrait (768×1024), and Square (1024×1024) through Desktop Landscape (1920×1080) and Bigscreen Landscape (3840×2160) to the print and video shapes: DIN A4 Portrait/Landscape, US Letter Portrait/Landscape, Video 16:9 (1920×1080), and Flex Landscape (1280×800). Because panel placement uses percentages of the page, your layout adapts when you switch frames.
• Zoom controls — zoom out, current zoom percentage, zoom in, and Fit to View.
• Page View / Panel View toggle — switches views (shown once your work has pages).
• View options — Grid, Rulers, Safe Area, and Snap toggles.
• Canvas info — the frame's pixel dimensions and aspect ratio.

Zoom and pan

Zooming steps through preset levels: 25%, 33%, 50%, 67%, 75%, 90%, 100%, 125%, 150%, 200%, 300%, 400%, 500%.

Selecting elements

With the Select tool (V) active:

• Click an element to select it. In panel view that's a layer, speech bubble, or hotspot; in page view it's a panel.
• Shift+Click adds an element to the selection (or removes an already-selected one).
• Marquee: drag on empty canvas to draw a selection rectangle — everything it touches gets selected.
• Ctrl/Cmd+A selects all layers in the panel.
• Escape clears the selection.

Selected elements show a bounding box with handles; the inspector switches to the matching tab automatically. When several panels are selected in page view, the primary panel (the one that drives resizing and snapping) has a solid outline and the others a dashed outline.

Moving and resizing

• Drag a selected element to move it. With multiple panels selected, they all move together, keeping their relative positions.
• Arrow keys nudge the selection by 1 pixel; Shift+Arrow nudges by 10 pixels. This works for layers, speech bubbles, and hotspots alike in panel view — whichever kind you selected last is what the arrows (and Delete) act on. Every nudge is one undo step; holding a key coalesces into one.
• Resize handles — 8 handles around the selection (corners and edges) resize it; the cursor shows the direction. A rotation handle sits above the selection.
• Ctrl/Cmd+D duplicates the selection (one copy); Delete/Backspace removes it. Deleting a panel that another page or format still uses only removes it from the open page — see Deleting panels.
• In page view you can also copy, cut, and paste panels with Ctrl/Cmd+C, Ctrl/Cmd+X, and Ctrl/Cmd+V.

Snapping, grid, and guides

• Grid (G) — overlays a light grid as a visual alignment aid. It never constrains placement by itself.
• Snap — when enabled, dragged elements snap to the grid.
• Smart guides — while dragging panels, alignment guides appear against the edges and centers of other panels (like in typical design tools), so it's easy to line things up even with the grid off.
• Rulers (Shift+R) — pixel rulers along the top and left edges.
• Safe Area — shows an inset border marking the zone that stays visible on all devices (and print bleed).

For precise numeric positioning, use the Layout & Transform section of the panel inspector — see Pages & Panels.

Aligning and distributing panels

With two or more panels selected in page view you can align them; with three or more you can distribute them evenly. Both are available from the right-click context menu (Align and Distribute submenus) and via shortcuts:

Stacking order and matching sizes

Two more right-click groups work on the whole multi-panel selection:

• Arrange — Bring to Front, Bring Forward, Send Backward, and Send to Back apply to every selected panel, not just the one you right-clicked. The selection keeps its own internal stacking: panels that overlapped each other still do so in the same order after they move up or down as a group. The whole move is one undo step and one save, and the stacking stays the same after a reload and in the reader.
• Match Size — Match Width, Match Height, or Match Width & Height copies the dimensions of the primary panel (the one with the solid outline — see Selecting elements) onto the other selected panels. A panel that would stick out past the page edge after growing is nudged back onto the page. Match Size needs at least two selected panels in page view; otherwise the entries are grayed out.

Page view vs panel view

Switching between views:

• The Page View / Panel View button in the canvas toolbar, or the V shortcut, toggles views.
• Double-click a panel in page view to open it in panel view.
• In panel view, Tab / Shift+Tab jump to the next / previous panel following the reading order.
• Selecting a page or a panel in the structure tree also switches the canvas to the matching view.
• The editor remembers your view per work: reloading the browser brings you back to the same page — and, if you were in panel view, reopens the same panel.

Adding content by drag and drop

• Asset → canvas: drag an image or video from the Assets tab onto the canvas. An overlay reads "Drop asset here to add to canvas". In page view, dropping on empty space creates a brand-new panel containing the media, while dropping onto an existing panel adds it to that panel. In panel view it adds a layer to the current panel.
• Panel → page: drag a panel from the structure tree onto the canvas while in page view to place it on the page ("Drop panel to place it on this page"). If you're in panel view, the overlay tells you to switch to page view first.

Dropped media always keeps its true aspect ratio: the first image or video in a panel becomes its background and the panel's proportions adjust to match the media — in every page format the work supports, not just the one you are viewing. The panel keeps its top-left position and only ever shrinks to match, so it always stays on the page; panels that already contain an image or video are never resized by later drops. (If an asset predates dimension tracking, its size is measured on the fly at drop time and stored.)

Right-click menu

Right-clicking the canvas opens a context menu with actions for the current selection — adding layers and hotspots, an Add Speech Bubble submenu with all ten balloon types (including snap-to-border Narrator and Panel-Top placements — see Speech Bubbles), arranging order (Arrange), and the Align, Distribute, and Match Size submenus for multi-panel selections. Entries that don't apply to your selection are grayed out.

Related pages