Managing viewports on the canvas

The canvas can be thought of as an infinite screen or bulletin board on which you post viewports; you can imagine the canvas extending beyond the main window and your monitor.

The visible portion of the canvas is called the drawing area, and you can increase its size by increasing the size of the main window. You can display the drawing area full screen using the View menu; you can also press F11 to toggle between full screen mode and normal mode.

You can position viewports anywhere on the canvas, and you can drag them outside the drawing area. When viewports are positioned outside the drawing area, you can cascade or tile the viewports to bring them back into view. Viewports are not part of a model and are not saved between sessions.

This chapter explains how to create and manipulate viewports, text annotations, and arrow annotations.


In this section:

Understanding viewports
Manipulating viewports and viewport annotations
Displaying the drawing area in full screen mode
Working with viewports
Working with viewport arrow and text annotations
Linking viewports for view manipulation
Working with background images and movies in viewports