The canvas view

An optional beta view of your document as an infinite plane, with camera movement between frames when you present.

Deck and Canvas#

At the top of the editor you can switch between two views of one document:

• Deck — the familiar slide-by-slide view.
• Canvas — an infinite plane, where every object in the deck is laid out in space and slide boundaries stop mattering.

Nothing about the document changes; only how you look at it. Objects, reactivity, and content are identical in both.

How objects arrive on the plane#

Nothing has to be moved onto the canvas. Every object starts at its unrolled deck position — slide one's objects where they sit, slide two's the same but a column to the right, and so on — so a deck you have never opened on the canvas already reads as a filmstrip laid flat.

Drag an object here and it takes a canvas placement of its own. That is a second position, not a replacement: moving something on the canvas never moves it on the slide, and moving it on the slide never disturbs where you put it here.

Quodra also draws the dependency graph between them, as curved wires: parameter → cell, cell → artifact, and table → chart. These come from the real graph the document computes with, not from anything you draw, so a wire on the canvas is a claim you can trust.

Moving the camera#

A trackpad two-finger scroll pans; hold ⌘ (or pinch) to zoom about the pointer. Dragging the background pans too. ⌘Z and ⇧⌘Z undo and redo, Delete removes what is selected, and ⎋ clears the selection.

Frames — the waypoints of a canvas talk#

A frame is a named camera region: not a slide, not a container, just a rectangle of the plane worth looking at.

1. Move and zoom the camera until the view is what you want the room to see.
2. Press + Frame on the canvas toolbar. The current view is captured as Frame 1, Frame 2, and so on.
3. Click a frame's chip to fly the camera back to it, with a glide rather than a cut. The × on the chip removes it.

Because a frame is a region rather than a box, frames may overlap and nest freely — a wide frame over the whole argument, and tighter ones inside it for each step. Nothing belongs to a frame, so moving an object never breaks one, and a frame drawn over empty plane is perfectly valid.

Frames are part of the document. They save with it, travel with a copy, and reach your collaborators like any other change.

Why the canvas#

Some talks are not a straight line. On the canvas you can lay frames out spatially — a central idea with detail frames around it, a branching argument, a map — and the relationships between them are visible at a glance.

Reach for the deck when the talk is a sequence and each slide is a beat. Reach for the canvas when the shape of the argument is part of the point, or when the audience needs to see how far a detail sits from the whole.

Presenting on the canvas#

When you present a canvas document, moving between frames glides the camera across the plane rather than cutting between slides. Zooming out to the whole layout and back in to a detail becomes part of the talk — the structure of your argument is something the room can see.

Your frames are the stops, in the order you made them, and the counter in the corner reads position and total. The keys are the deck's: arrow keys, space or Page Down for the next stop, Page Up or the reverse arrows to go back, Home and End for the ends, B to black the screen, and ⎋ to leave. With no frames defined, the whole canvas is a single stop.

Parameters, cells and simulations can remain live while you present, subject to feature access, Python trust and execution settings, and parameter policies. Hidden objects stay hidden, and the wires you see while editing are not drawn on stage. Shared links and embeds use the slide viewer and do not reproduce a live Canvas presentation.

Which presentation you get follows the view you are in: present from the deck and you get slides, present from the canvas and you get the camera.

Next#

• The editor — where the Deck/Canvas switch lives.
• Presenting — how a canvas is presented.