Zooming in and out

- In this movie, I'll show you how to zoom into your document and zoom out from it. And the idea is that sometimes, you want to get very close to a detail to make sure it looks exactly right. And other times, you want to back away so you can take in the entire document. And the simplest way to zoom in and out is to go to the View menu and choose one of these two commands, either Zoom In to get closer, or Zoom Out to get farther away. The thing is, you end up using these commands so often that you're better off memorizing the keyboard shortcuts, which are pretty straightforward.

It's ctrl + plus or cmd + plus on the Mac to zoom in and ctrl + minus or cmd + minus on the Mac to zoom out. Let me show you what that looks like. First, I want you to notice our current zoom level, which is listed up here in the title tab. And for me, it's 33.3%. So if I press ctrl + plus or cmd + plus on the Mac, I'm going to not only zoom in but I'll see this new zoom level of 50%. And if I continue to press ctrl + plus or cmd + plus on the Mac, I'll zoom in farther still, ultimately, in this case, to 100%, which theoretically represents the document at the size it will print.

But you don't want to get too hung up on that because the document is really going to print it at a larger size, and you can always gauge that size by going to the File menu and choosing the Print command. And as we'll see in a later chapter, you even have the option of scaling the document on the fly as you print it. All right, I'm just going to press the escape key in order to hide that menu. And just for the sake of demonstration here, I'll now press ctrl + minus, or cmd + minus on the Mac, to zoom out incrementally as well. Now it turns out you can zoom way in on your document.

And noticed that I've already passed 1000% and now I'm quickly passing 10,000%. And you can even zoom in as far as 64,000%, which is a 640x-level of magnification, which if this were a microscope, would be enough magnification to take in an independent bacterium, which is why I've drawn one to scale right here. All right, and notice if I press ctrl + minus or cmd + minus on the Mac in order to zoom away, that it ultimately is going to disappear.

All right, now let's say you want to reset the zoom level to 100%. Then all you have to do is go to the View menu and choose Actual Size, or you also have this handy keyboard shortcut of ctrl + 1 or cmd + 1 for 100. And so I'll go ahead and do that. I'll press ctrl + 1 here on the PC, or cmd +1 on the Mac in order to quickly zoom out to 100%. All right, you may also recall from the previous chapter that you can zoom into specific artboards from the Artboards panel. And just by way of a refresher, I'll go up to the Window menu and choose the Artboards command in order to bring up that panel.

And then notice that I've got this big central artboard right here. I'm going to double-click on it, not on its name, because that would highlight the name so we can change it. Just go ahead and double-click on some other portion here in order to zoom out from the document so that you're exactly fitting the artboard on screen. And notice I also have these square artboard over here on the left and right sides of the central one. And so to get to them, I'll just go ahead and double-click on, say, Art square 1, which not only switches me to that artboard, but zooms into it as well.

And notice, by the way, that I have a little bit of a bleed associated with this artboard, so the black boundary represents the trim size, the actual printed size of this illustration, and the red boundary represents the bleed. And so this is how you use bleeds. You just go ahead and draw all the way out to them so that you give your commercial printer a little bit of wiggle room. All right, now I'm going to advance to the next artboard just by double-clicking on it. And this time, I'm not using the bleed because I don't need it, and so that's why this white background just extends to the boundary of the artboard, because there's really nothing going on outside of this cube of cubes.

All right, now I'll double-click on Art square 3, which is our fourth artboard, and I just want you to see that if I were to press ctrl + plus or cmd + plus on the Mac at this point, I'm going to zoom in on this active artboard. So I'm zooming in on the center of it. And then if I press ctrl + minus or cmd + minus on the Mac, I zoom out from the center of this active artboard. All right, another way to zoom in on an artboard is to click on it here inside the Artboards panel. And so in my case, I'm clicking on the final artboard.

I'm not double-clicking, I'm just selecting it. And then you go up to the View menu and you choose Fit Artboard in Window, or you press this keyboard shortcut of ctrl + 0, or cmd + 0 on a Mac, and that'll go ahead and zoom to whatever ratio is necessary to exactly fit that artboard on screen. All right, now let's say I decide to zoom way out. I'll just go ahead and press ctrl + minus, or cmd + minus on the Mac, as many times as it takes in order to see the entire pasteboard. So you may recall this dark area is the pasteboard where you can place anything you like.

You can use it as a kind of graphical junk drawer so that you can bring elements back if you need them later. But it's important to know that the pasteboard does have a physical limit, and you can't go anywhere outside of it. So this light gray area represents the end of the universe inside Illustrator. All right, now let's say I want to zoom back in so I can take in all of the artboards. I can do that by going up to the View menu and choosing the command right after Fit Artboard in Window, which is Fit All in Window. And notice that it has a slightly modified keyboard shortcut of ctrl + alt + 0 here on the PC, or cmd + opt + 0 on the Mac.

And that, friends, is how you zoom in and out inside of a document using any of these five commands here inside the View menu. Or one of these handy shortcuts listed here on the right-hand side.