New features for drawings

We'd like to let you know about a few new features we’ve recently added to drawings. Go create a drawing to check them out.

Center on page
While it’s possible to use alignment guides to center an object or group of objects on the page, now you can center an object on the page quickly using the context menu or Format menu.

Aspect-constrained canvas re-size
You’ll often want to just shrink or expand your working canvas size without changing the aspect ratio, which is 4 x 3 by default. So, now you can hold shift while you re-size the canvas to preserve its current aspect ratio.


Thumbnails for drawings in the doc list
When you search for drawings it’s really helpful to see the results. Now you can use the thumbnail view in your doc list to quickly preview all of the drawings in the results of your search.

Full text search for drawings
Some drawings may also contain text that you may want to search for. Now we let you search through all of the text in your drawings - within a text box, shape, or word art - so that when you search for that text from your private docs list, your drawing will show up in the results.

Pop-up keyboard shortcut help
We know there are a lot of tricky little keyboard modifiers you need to know about to use some of the most powerful features of drawings. Now these shortcuts be easily inspected at a glance by hitting Control / or Command / on a Mac which has the distinction of being the last keyboard shortcut you ever need to memorize. Kudos to the Gmail team for inspiring this design.


Let us know what you think in the forums.

Posted by: Chris Nokleberg, Software Engineer