Navigating

A quadrium image is theoretically an infinite view that can be zoomed infinitely in or out (in practice, nothing on a computer is infinite, but suffice it to say that quadrium documents are really big and detailed). Normally, you view the document from a "home" position, but you can move around.

1. To pan the image, you just click and drag in the view (if you click and drag from the frame around the image, you will drag a small thumbnail of the image which you can drop one of the "drop tabs" at the top of the screen, or in various other places in the UI)

2. To zoom in, press the "+" button. Holding the button will continue to zoom in

3. To zoom out, press the "-" button. Holding the button will continue to zoom out

4. To rotate the view, turn the dial. If you control/right click on the dial, a pop-up menu will appear with some common settings for this.

5. To return to the home view, click the button with the house icon

6. To return to the previous view, hit the back button (the left pointing arrow). Similarly, you can go forward through the view history with the right pointing arrow.

Besides these controls, there are a series of view modes, controlled by the popup menu on the right. By default, clicking and dragging in the view will pan the view. There are, however, several other mode

Hand (space): Pan the view

Selection ('a'): Select an area of the view to zoom into

In Out Arrow ('z'): Zoom the image in/out

Circular Arrows ('r'): Rotate the image

Magnifier ('m'): Inspect closer view of part of the screen, which can be further zoomed using the scroll wheel on your mouse or the up and down arrow keys

Eye dropper ('e'): Determine the color and coordinate of locations on the screen (will change the color of any selected color well control)

The shift key can also be held down to contrain the movement, and the option key will enable "finer tracking".

You can temporarily toggle between these modes by holding down the following keys listed above (and it will revert to the previous mode when you release the key) - holding down the shift key will change the mode.

If you hold down the command key while clicking, it will show the rulers for the given image, allowing you to position your images elements. The units used for the rule match those that are set for the document.

Changing the Home View

If you find that the interesting part of the image isn't at the home location, or at the default zooming value (which is fairly common), you can effectively change this.

1. Find the default view you want

2. Choose Structure > Scale Home to Current

Note that this doesn't actually change the home view, rather it adds a node to the structure that performs an affine transformation to scale, translate, and rotate the image to the current view. This is useful because adding additional nodes before this node will work with the new space (so adding a mirror will mirror around this new center, instead of the original center).