Roll20 uses cookies to improve your experience on our site. Cookies enable you to enjoy certain features, social sharing functionality, and tailor message and display ads to your interests on our site and others. They also help us understand how our site is being used. By continuing to use our site, you consent to our use of cookies. Update your cookie preferences .
×
May your rolls be merry + bright! 🎄
Create a free account

Workspace Centering

I have been using Roll20 on and off since 2012. I keep quitting because the workspace is aligned/centered left. I have never figured out how to fix this. It is the most unintuitive and obnoxious part about Roll20 for me. I might be ignorant or uninformed, perhaps lazy, but I have never found a solution. When I zoom out I have all this space to the right and only when I zoom in do I get a more centered view. It makes placing and working with content extremely difficult with this tunnel vision. Zooming out to see if things are aligned and to see the board as a whole is important. The frustration is also compounded by the re-rendering/loading of the board when you pan around. I see lots of threads about aligning tiles to a grid, about scaling and I have yet to find any information about this issue of centering. I would really appreciate some insight into this issue. I want the workspace 100% centered, not crammed on the left side of my monitor. 
1484099190
Gold
Forum Champion
You can hide the chat room on the right side, thus having edge-to-edge tabletop. &nbsp;Click the tab-symbol with the 3 bars near the top-left of the Sidebar in Roll20 to hide the sidebar, or use the Advanced Shortcut (c). To center your view or the player's view on a particular point, the GM can Shift-Ping on that point, centering the view there. Wiki docs, <a href="https://wiki.roll20.net/Advanced_Shortcuts" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.roll20.net/Advanced_Shortcuts</a> Wiki, <a href="https://wiki.roll20.net/Text_Chat" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.roll20.net/Text_Chat</a> If you are referring to the grey-hatched background, that is the margins outside your Page area. &nbsp;If you prefer to fill your screen entirely without seeing those grey margins, and without zooming, the best way to do this is to increase your Page Size to something large like 80x120. On large page sizes like this you can pan around as you like and fully fill the tabletop area with no margins showing. It's like making a bigger table. Wiki, <a href="https://wiki.roll20.net/Page_Settings#Page_Size" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.roll20.net/Page_Settings#Page_Size</a>
I was aware of all of that. I was just hoping I could make the workspace like Photoshop where the content is dead center. Thanks for the response though.
Is there any potential this might be a future change?
1484255974
The Aaron
Pro
API Scripter
I'm not sure anyone has brought it up as something that needs to be changed before. &nbsp;You might create a suggestion in the Suggestions and Ideas forum. &nbsp;I don't know that I fully understand what the issue is, to be honest. &nbsp;Maybe a video comparing the behavior between Photoshop's workspace and Roll20's table would clear it up; I probably don't know what I'm missing.&nbsp;
I don't have Photoshop on this machine so i cant add screenshots. tho this is what i think you mean and a couple of suggestions When in Photoshop the default setup is that your work space default is set center and aligned to center so the middle of the canvas would be at the center of your monitor with the basic tools and pallet set on your left their own toolbar&nbsp;and then layers and overview set on the right. Roll20 when in game it defaults to top left corner for aligning and viewing regardless of the map size and with the chat on the right where you would find Photoshops layers. The tools are also on the left in their own toolbar and the default turn counter position is to the left. However these are over the top of the play area so they actually end up covering things instead of separate to the play area therefore the play area is off as it is pushed left by the chat box and not centered to the monitor with the left side being covered slightly meaning you may end up having to constantly move your view/zoom ect depending on the map. Also there is no extra space off the canvas on the left or top so when the map is small this becomes even more apparent. Now if you have 2 monitors like i do you can pop out the chat window by double clicking the chat icon at the top then move it over. You can also set the character sheets to pop out to in settings and do the same. This way you can then hide the remaining tabs in game which will cause roll 20 to take up the whole screen and become more center on your one monitor. Unfortunately these are the only windows you can pop out so if you need to change or access anything else from the tabs you will have to keep opening them up to access the information your after. I would also not recommend doing this if you have only one monitor as you will find yourself constantly alt tabbing between explorer windows. And unfortunately if you zoom out far enough you will still have the left align issue. As The Aaron said it may be worth explaining in more detail and putting what you mean as a suggestion with some screen shots to help explain.
The Aaron said: behavior between Photoshop's workspace and Roll20's table would clear it up; I probably don't know what I'm missing.&nbsp; When you zoom in or out in roll20, it doesn't stay centered on the image. It is left justified. When you zoom in and out in Photoshop, whatever image you are working on stays focused, dead center, to the image.
1484330654

Edited 1484330665
keithcurtis
Forum Champion
Marketplace Creator
API Scripter
Ah, if that's the case, now that makes sense. I think the intuitive thing would be to have zooming in and out center on whatever is selected, and in absence of a selection, the center of the currently viewed area. I'm so used to the way it works I've pretty much trained my brain to work with it.
Kairain said: I don't have Photoshop on this machine so i cant add screenshots. tho this is what i think you mean and a couple of suggestions When in Photoshop the default setup is that your work space default is set center and aligned to center so the middle of the canvas would be at the center of your monitor with the basic tools and pallet set on your left their own toolbar&nbsp;and then layers and overview set on the right. Roll20 when in game it defaults to top left corner for aligning and viewing regardless of the map size and with the chat on the right where you would find Photoshops layers. The tools are also on the left in their own toolbar and the default turn counter position is to the left. However these are over the top of the play area so they actually end up covering things instead of separate to the play area therefore the play area is off as it is pushed left by the chat box and not centered to the monitor with the left side being covered slightly meaning you may end up having to constantly move your view/zoom ect depending on the map. Also there is no extra space off the canvas on the left or top so when the map is small this becomes even more apparent. Now if you have 2 monitors like i do you can pop out the chat window by double clicking the chat icon at the top then move it over. You can also set the character sheets to pop out to in settings and do the same. This way you can then hide the remaining tabs in game which will cause roll 20 to take up the whole screen and become more center on your one monitor. Unfortunately these are the only windows you can pop out so if you need to change or access anything else from the tabs you will have to keep opening them up to access the information your after. I would also not recommend doing this if you have only one monitor as you will find yourself constantly alt tabbing between explorer windows. And unfortunately if you zoom out far enough you will still have the left align issue. As The Aaron said it may be worth explaining in more detail and putting what you mean as a suggestion with some screen shots to help explain. Well you hit it on the head. I do have 2 monitors but the issue is again the alignment of the board and the actual mechanics of zooming in and out. These combine to make the whole experience frustrating, at least for me. GIMP, Inkspace, PS, Pain.net, Illustrator, Aseprite - all of these have a design language and layout that is time-tested. They also tend to share shortcuts which makes moving from one program to another very easy. The whole interface of Roll20 is claustrophobic. Even the most simple function, the changing and editing of pages, drops down and covers portions of the screen you might need to see.&nbsp; For example, if you leave it open and want to click on any of the tool from the left hand menu, many of the drop down menus are obstructed. You can easily remedy this with using shortcuts, but a well made interface wouldn't have this issue to begin with. I am also not a fan of having to send objects to the back one by one, if a mistake is made you have to send them all to the back again. If the application still used the token/map layers then made layers within those layers, it would be extremely helpful. Especially if this functionality was presented as it is in so many other programs, like Photoshop.
Notice how the workspaces in these programs center the content that is important. You can zoom in and out, and when doing so it does not pull the workspace into the top left corner which wastes on screen realestate.