User Guide

Chapter 2: Documents and Setup

Presentations

Presentations and slideshows provide a powerful way of displaying technical data.

Presentation documents are designed for on-screen slideshow presentations. You can

use multiple layers and a master slide to hold background elements. You can use more

than a dozen transition effects, including wipe and dissolve, during slide show

playback.

Animations

Create simple animations from your technical illustrations.

An Animation document is designed for creating and editing web (GIF) animation files.

An animation is composed of multiple frames, which are equivalent to the image

frames of film-based animations.

You can use onion-skinning in an Animation document. When you select onion-

skinning, frames adjacent to the current frame appear in the background. This helps

set up object movement in an animation.

Using document templates

Templates are special Canvas documents that you can use as the basis for new documents. When

you select a template in the New dialog box, Canvas creates a new document containing the graphics

and text in the template and uses the template’s settings for layers, slides, pages, rulers, grids,

guides, views, and default object attributes.

How is a template different than a regular Canvas document? When you choose a template in the New

dialog box, Canvas creates a new document based on the template, but doesn’t actually open the

template file. When you make changes to the new document and save it to disk, the changes don’t

affect the template.

Canvas treats a template in a similar way when you open one by double-clicking its icon or using the

Open command. In either case, rather than open the actual template document, Canvas makes a new

document based on the template’s document type and contents.

Templates, like regular Canvas documents, are various types: Illustration, Presentation, Publication,

and Animation. In the New dialog box, the templates listed in the Use Template pop-up menu match

the document type selected in the Type of Document area.