03. Software basics

Drawing area

In the centre of the TactileView window you can find the drawing area of the design. The drawing area is surrounded with a red border, indicating the size of the printable area on the selected paper size for the selected printer. Some printers have larger margins along the edges of the paper that cannot be printed, resulting in a smaller area within the red border compared to other printers.
The white area shows the actual size of the contents of your design. The size of the contents can be increased in size both horizontally and vertically to span multiple pages. If the white area does not fit within the red border of the printable area, you can reduce the size to make it fit within the page(s) using the purple markers on the four sides. The blue marker in the lower right corner is used to scale the entire design.
All software functions are situated around this drawing area.

Top section: menus and horizontal icon bars

Above the drawing area, you can find three elements: the software menus, two horizontal icon bars and the names of the opened documents. The top row of icons are general functions for the software, whereas the second row contains functions related to the design that you are working on in the drawing area. In some icons, a small arrow indicates that there is a dropdown toolbar with additional options. Most icons will depict the function that they represent. To get more information, your can hover over the icon with the mouse. Tooltips in your selected language will be displayed, explaining which function will be activated when you click on the icon.

Left section: vertical icon bars

On the left hand side you can find two vertical icon bars. The leftmost vertical icon bar contains all the drawing tools to create graphics or modify the content of your design. By selecting one of these tools and clicking in the drawing area, different objects can be placed.
The right vertical icon bar will show the range of properties for the current selection. This can either be the drawing tool selected from the left toolbar, or the object in the design that has the focus. You can (re)select an object by clicking on it in the design area.
Once again, tooltips will explain which functions are represented by the icons in the vertical toolbars.

Bottom section: status line

Below the drawing area you will find the status line, showing mouse position, dimensions, etc. for the selected drawing tool or object in the design.

First impression

After launching the software, the red border is showing the current paper size and orientation.

The word ‘Title’ can be found in the top left corner. This is to make you aware of the importance of a title in your design, which will help the reader to understand the content of the diagram at hand.

When you open a new design, you will see a tactile marker in the upper right corner. This so-called right-up marker helps a blind reader to easily find out the paper orientation without having to explore its contents first. This the position of the right-up marker is always in the top right corner, independent of landscape or portrait orientation. On screen, the marker is shown as three blue lines at an angle of 45 degrees.

For most designs we advise you to include the right-up marker for ease of use. However, by clicking on the marker it can be turned off, which for example can be used if you want to print multiple designs in a bundle and bind them. A red marker will remain which can be activated to switch the marker on again.

Design orientation: landscape or portrait designs

Choosing the right paper orientation for your design allows you to make optimal use of the available space on the paper. This way the image can be presented as large as possible in order to retain smaller details. You can change the paper orientation by clicking on the ‘Change the orientation to landscape/portrait’ icon in the design toolbar (second vertical toolbar when nothing is selected). You can also find this option in the Design menu.

It is important to know that changing the paper orientation will not adjust the size of the image! This ensures that the tactile quality of the image is maintained. However, you might need to adjust the width and/or height manually to fit the new paper orientation by dragging the markers around the design.

Portrait to landscape orientation

When you start with a design with a tree in portrait mode and you decide you want to have it in landscape, you can change the paper orientation. The size of the white design area that contains the tree will stay the same.

It is likely that the lower part of your design will now be outside the red border and that you have two sheets of paper instead of one. Even though you could have a design spread over multiple sheets, chances are you would want to reduce the design size to fit a single sheet of paper. You can use the blue marker in the lower right corner to make the height of the tree fit. Please note that your tree has become smaller, so make sure any smaller details are still adequate for tactile use. Next, use the purple marker in the middle of the right side of your design to add paper to span the width of the paper.

Landscape to portrait orientation

The other way around, you might start with a tree that spans the height of a design in landscape orientation, but decide you want it to be in portrait to make better use of the length of the paper. In that case, you could increase the size of the image by using the blue marker in the lower right corner. You can use the purple markers in the middle of the two sides of the white area to trim any empty space left and right of the tree.

For more information, see section ‘Paper size vs. design size‘.

Line view and Dot view

To get you familiar as soon as possible with the effect of creating designs for braille embossers, you can view the design on screen as it will be embossed in dots.

For good visibility you can use the line view mode for the drawing. When you switch to dot view, all lines will be converted to individual dots, just as your braille embosser will do.

You can read more in the section ‘Design mode: dot view/line view‘.

Formulas in graphs

When multiple formulas are used in a graph, each formula in a graph will have its own colour (red, green, blue and yellow) to easily distinguish between them. These different colours are only used for display on the screen and will not lead to differences on a print.

Braille tables
In a single document, multiple braille tables can be used to accommodate for language variations. In the design toolbar (right vertical toolbar when nothing is selected), click ‘Show used braille tables’ to see an overview of the different braille tables in the design. Colours are used in the legend and design to distinguish the different braille tables.

Audio styles

Objects with audiostyles are presented with a light red/pink fill.