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Zoom and pan

You can zoom in and out the current drawing using the two arrow buttons in the zoom field. The current zoom factor is displayed between the two arrows. If this factor is equal to 1.0, that means that the distances on paper (when printing the Ipe figure) will be equal to the distance on the screen (the glass surface in front of you). Related are the functions normal size (which sets the zoom factor back to 1.0), zoom to fit (which chooses the zoom factor such that the drawing fills the screen), and fit selected (which does the same for the selected objects) in the misc menu.

  The zoom field also contains the transparent button. When the transparent mode is on, all objects on the canvas will be shown unfilled. This only affects the display, the preview window and the contents of an Ipe file will be unchanged.

Furthermore, you can pan the drawing, i.e. move all elements of the drawing with respect to the screen, by pressing the Shift key and dragging with the middle mouse button. Note that Ipe drawings are "free floating," since when they are included into a LaTeX document all coordinates become relative to the position of the insertion. So, the pan operation is nearly equivalent to a move operation with everything selected. They only difference is that pan does not register in the undo buffer, and that pan does not lead into trouble when you use it in multi-page documents with template--there, the drawing should not be allowed to move with respect to the template.

Instead of explicitly panning with the middle mouse button, you can also press the o key anywhere on the canvas. The drawing is then panned such that the cursor position is moved to the center of the canvas. This shortcut has the advantage that it also works while you are in the middle of any drawing operation. Since the same holds for the zoom in and zoom out buttons, you can home in on any feature of your drawing while you are adding another object.


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