Pages, frames and templates

Pages

A drawing can hold up to 50 pages, shown as tabs under the canvas. Choose a tab to show its page; + adds a page after the current one. The buttons beside the tabs rename (or double-click a tab), duplicate, move the current page earlier or later, and delete it after asking. Each page keeps its own objects, view and selection.

Undo and Redo cover the whole drawing in order: they undo the most recent change wherever it was, showing its page, including adding, renaming, moving or deleting a page (a deleted page comes back whole). Library entries, templates, images and pastes land on the page you are on, and Find searches every page and shows the page of each match. The 2,000-object limit counts every page. Opening an earlier drawing gives it one page.

Frames and presenting

Choose the Frame tool (F) and drag to draw a named region whose name shows above it. Objects whose centre is inside a frame belong to it, so dragging an object in or out adds or removes it, and anything drawn round existing objects takes them in. Objects in a frame are clipped to its edge and still appear in Objects. Pick a frame by its border or its name; moving, copying, duplicating, deleting, flipping, aligning or saving it to the library takes its objects along, and one undo puts everything back. Where frames overlap an object belongs to the smaller one. Frames stay upright and cannot hold arrow ends.

The Frames panel lists frames in presentation order. Rename a frame there or by double-clicking its name, move it earlier or later, Show it (fit it in the view), or export just that frame as PNG or SVG, cropped exactly to the frame. Present shows the frames full screen, one at a time, without changing the drawing: use the arrow keys, Page Up/Page Down, Space, Home and End, swipe on a touch screen, or the Previous and Next buttons. Escape or Exit ends it.

Presenter aids

• "3 / 8" shows briefly at each frame, and screen readers hear the frame and its name.
• B blanks the screen to black and W to white; any key or a click brings the frame back, and Escape on a blank screen returns rather than ending the show.
• K (or Laser pointer in the bar) turns on a laser pointer: drag to leave a short red trail that fades. It also works on the canvas, where presses point instead of drawing or selecting. The laser is never saved and never undone.

Starter templates

Templates at the top shows six ready-made diagrams: an approval flowchart, customer orders as an ERD, order service classes in UML, a web request path, a product launch mind map and a publishing state machine. Each shows a preview. Insert adds the template to the middle of your view as one step a single undo removes; New drawing replaces your drawing with it after offering to save the current one. Everything in a template is ordinary editable objects and connectors, templates work offline, and the text inside them stays in English.