Hello, this is Cristi. Today, a new version of Camtasia 2022 released, 2022.3. And the
most notable update, apart from some bug fixes, is the introduction of rulers. You can have
rulers now around your canvas so that you can better align things. And not only that,
you can bring those guides from the rulers and drag them onto your canvas and help you
align things or snap stuff.
So let's have a look how to enable that. I have a blank new project in here and now in
this version, you go to View menu and there is a command, Show canvas ruler. You can also
press Control + Shift + R.
So when you do this, you notice the rulers appearing around the edges of the canvas,
top and left, and it kind of looks like one of those graphics editing software or you
know, like Adobe and Photoshop and all those things where you can have this sidebar rulers
that you can then drag guides from.
The numbers on the ruler start from the center of the screen and they reflect the number
of pixels from the center to the top, from the center to the sides, and so on.
So this would actually help you align things better. If you constantly use auxiliary assets
to help you align using the snapping, this actually helps you now. So look, if I drag
from the left, I can create a grid or a guide here, and I'm going to drag one from the top.
And you can always see, as you drag, the number changing to the pixel value that you are getting
that grid onto, that guide. So if I go to the very center, I go to zero.
And the problem with this is that, okay, this is great and useful and it's certainly a step
in the right direction. The problem is, It doesn't seem to be, you don't seem to be able
to drag these guides in, let's say, increments of 10 pixels or 20 or something like that,
which would help you kind of create your own grid, and which would allow you to maybe evenly
distribute some objects, right?
So if I want to bring another one in here and kind of make sure that it's equally distanced,
I have to carefully look at the pixel position and kind of move that in the correct place.
And if you don't have a mouse with very good resolution, you're going to have a hard time
doing that.
So my request for a feature, consider this a request for a feature, is to allow a shortcut
key modifier to snap these guides as you pull them, in increments of maybe 10 or whatever.
And a better development would be to actually allow you to create a grid based on these
guides.
Now, I'm never happy am I? So this would be amazing if you could create a grid and say,
let me create a grid of 10 by 10 of these guides, and distribute them equally across
the surface of my canvas. That would allow me to align, you know, and distribute items
in a much more helpful way.
But anyway, I added these grids here, these guides, let's call them guides, not grids.
So look, I'm kind of eyeballing this and creating a bit of a grid for myself here. So now, if
I go to Annotations and I bring in some kind of a text box, you can see that it snaps in
these guides that I just created.
So I suppose that's a useful way. And another way is, if you need to repeat that and create
another increment of the same dimension, you could always move your object down and grab
that, but even then, it doesn't snap to the objects on your canvas, so that's not helpful
either.
So anyway, as I said, it would've been amazing, because right now it seems a little bit minimal.
I mean, you've got the guides and you've got the rulers, but, you know, it's pretty much
freehand when you, when you think about it.
So while it's a good, good start, I would really love that in the future updates, we
get all these improvements, like I mentioned. So in the meantime, I'm going to actually
still rely on my own built grid packs, which I have always in my library here. And look,
if I need a 10 by 10 grid, I just pull this in here, and I've got a 10 by 10 grid. I can
lock this down in the timeline right there, and now I can align items in a 10 by 10 grid.
If I want to remove these guides that I just added, I can right-click on one of them and
either remove the one I clicked or remove all of them.
So another improvement would've been if you click on the grid to set the color of the
grid, the thickness maybe, and you know, all these things, which I don't believe they are
available in the Settings. Let's have a look, in the Advanced here, perhaps. No, there doesn't
seem to be any settings to control the aspect of these guides that you pull.
So anyway, I'm going to right-click and remove all ruler guides, and now I can align my objects
using my own grid like this. So there you have it.
But anyway, this is a, as I said, definitely a great step in the right direction because
maybe, you know, it's not, shouldn't be very hard to implement all these other functionalities
that actually going to make this useful.
Oh, and I almost forgot. There's another change, another improvement in the interface on the
canvas with this version that you can enable the size and change the size of the controls
on the canvas. So for example, if you are having trouble clicking on these controls
here when you are resizing objects or dragging them around and so on, and if you felt like
maybe you have a very high resolution screen. So now Camtasia is a little more aware of
the resolution, the high resolution screens, high density screens, I think they, the way
they call them. So you can actually change a setting to turn on all of these things that
are quite small and maybe hard to grab, to make them larger.
So you control this by going to the Edit menu, go to Preferences, and it is called, Canvas
control size. So it says right here, to adjust the appearance of control points and handles
on the canvas. So watch what happens, this is one now by defaulted 1x, so I have a 4K
screen right now and I think I have pretty good eyesight, it doesn't bother me that these
are quite small. They used to be even smaller. But let's turn them on to Extra large, 2x,
which should make these handles twice the size. So let's click OK and sure enough, there
you go. They're quite large now, and you can much easier grab them and move them around,
you know, even the rotation center, you know, you see how large they are now.
So this is definitely an accessibility option, I suppose, improvement, if you like, to make
these things much easier to grab and move around and see. And look, this actually changes
the ruler font size as well. So you can see the pixel amounts are still correct, but they're
showing much larger and, um, so on.
So you can drag this and watch it and see it pretty closely. If you need this, it's
now accessible in here. So I guess Techsmith has become a little more aware and helping
with high resolution displays like Retina and all those things, 4k, 5k, whatever they
are.
Anyway, thank you for watching. I hope you enjoyed this, and if you find it useful or
if you have any ideas of how to improve this, feel free to leave it in the comments.
I'd be curious what you think about this and how you would see it done better. Thanks again,
and I'll see you on the next one.