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When crafting an illustration in BioRender, the size of your canvas plays an important role in both design and exporting. The canvas size impacts the resolution of the illustration when exported, influencing the quality of the final product. By carefully selecting the appropriate canvas size, you can create illustrations that are of high quality and tailored to your specific needs.

There are three things that affect your canvas when working in BioRender:

You can adjust your canvas size during an illustration:

You can also lock the aspect ratio so that you can adjust your canvas without affecting its ratio by editing only W or H:

When making an illustration, you can pick either inches or centimeters as your unit of measurement. It's really up to your personal preference as your choice of unit of measurement for an illustration will not affect the overall outcome of the illustration.

If you switch between cm and inches, the units will convert while keeping the same canvas size. For example:

If you attempt to adjust the canvas outside the min-max values, the canvas will reset to its previous ratio and size.

Zooming is for editing and viewing only, and won't change your canvas size. Use it to see small details or view your poster from a distance. Hit "reset X" to fit your canvas back onto your drawing board.

If you are using a touchpad: You can also zoom by pinching or spreading your two fingers simultaneously.

Please note that using ctrl+(+) and ctrl+(-) or commands will zoom your browser window and not your drawing board and will impact the user interface of BioRender.

When adding a template to your illustration you have two options:

If you select "add" when adding a template to your illustration, your canvas size will stay the same. However, if you choose "replace," the canvas size will change automatically to match that of the template.

When you export an illustration, the ratio is fixed, but you can still adjust the size of the export by changing either the width or height. The other dimension will adjust automatically to maintain the ratio.

Export also has an additional size option compared to illustration; pixels.

Values outside the minimum and maximum limits will prevent exporting. This applies to inches, centimetres, and pixels.

For the best quality when exporting in JPG or PDF format, it's recommended to increase the dimensions to their maximum limit. Smaller exports in these formats may turn out blurry and low-quality.

As an example:

Exporting at 1.43 inches W and 1 inch H with 150 DPI

Exporting at 10 inches W and 7 inches H at 150 DPI

Have any questions or concerns?

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