Every piece of media on the canvas is selected, moved, resized, rotated, duplicated and deleted the same way, whether it is a photo, an SVG, a PDF page or a text box. What changes with the type is the toolbar.
Selecting
Tap or click a piece of media to select it. A selection box appears around it with handles, and the toolbar changes to the tools for that media type — image tools for an image, text tools for text.
Tap or click empty canvas to deselect. In the browser and desktop apps, Escape does the same.
Moving
Drag from anywhere inside the selection box.
In the browser and desktop apps you can also nudge with the arrow keys: one pixel per press, or ten pixels with Shift held. Useful for the last millimetre of alignment that dragging cannot land.
Resizing
Two kinds of handle:
- Corner handles scale the media uniformly, about its own box, so the opposite corner stays put.
- Edge handles — the pills on each side — stretch a single axis, about the opposite edge.
You can also let Docuslice do it: the image tools offer three fit modes that resize the media to the canvas automatically and keep doing so as you change the layout. Text has no equivalent — a text box is resized by its handles, and its type size by the font size control.
Rotating
Two ways, for two different needs:
- The rotate handle on the selection box turns the media freely. Drag it around the box; it snaps to 45-degree steps as you pass near them, so square angles are easy to hit exactly.
- The rotate button in the toolbar turns it 90 degrees per press. This is the one you want for putting a landscape photo on a portrait poster — four presses returns it to where it started. In the browser and desktop apps, the R key does the same.
Rotation is preserved in the export, and it is applied consistently between the canvas preview and the printed sheets.
Duplicating
The clone button in the toolbar copies the selected media and places the copy slightly offset, so you can see both. It works for images, text and SVGs.
Cmd/Ctrl + D does the same in the browser and desktop apps. Copy, cut and paste also exist, but in the browser only — the desktop app's native menu owns those keys. Paste there also accepts an image copied from outside Docuslice, so a screenshot goes straight onto the canvas. Repeated pastes stagger so a run of copies does not stack invisibly, and copy on one page then paste on another works, because the clipboard belongs to the session rather than to a canvas. See keyboard shortcuts.
Deleting
Select and use the delete button in the toolbar. In the browser and desktop apps, Delete or Backspace does it.
Deleting is undoable — see undo and redo.
Getting things lined up
Dragging by eye is imprecise, so the canvas helps:
- Media snaps to the edges and centres of the canvas and of other media as you drag, with a guide line showing what it snapped to.
- Rulers and your own dragged guides give you fixed references to work against.
Both are covered in guides, rulers and snapping.