Zoom tool and Fit visible content in PDF by Zaweba

Zooming by percentages is fine for reading, but clumsy when you want to look closely at one corner of a page. You nudge the zoom up, scroll sideways, scroll down, nudge again, and eventually the detail you wanted is somewhere near the middle. PDF by Zaweba has two quicker ways to get the view you want: a zoom tool that zooms to exactly the area you point at, and a fit command that ignores the empty margins.

The Zoom tool

Pick View > Zoom tool. Now drag a box round an area of the page, and the view zooms so that area fills it. One drag takes you straight from a whole drawing to the label you need to read, or from a full page of small print to the clause you want to check.

Clicking with the tool zooms in. Alt+click zooms out. Between the three you can move round a large page quickly without touching the zoom box or the scroll bars.

This is a great help with technical drawings, maps and plans, where the interesting detail is small and scattered. It is equally useful with dense tables, fine print in contracts and small charts in reports. Draw round the part you care about, read it, Alt+click to step back out, and draw round the next.

Fit visible content

Many PDFs have generous white margins. When you fit the page to the window, a good part of your screen is spent showing empty paper. View > Fit visible content, on Ctrl+5, zooms so that the printed part of the page fills the width instead. The margins slide off the sides and the text gets bigger without you having to work out a zoom percentage.

This is the setting to reach for when reading on a laptop or a small screen. A report set with wide margins becomes noticeably easier to read, and you still see the full width of each line, so there is no scrolling sideways.

It also suits scanned pages, which often have a dark or uneven border from the scanner. Fitting the visible content gives the page itself more room.

Choosing the right zoom

Think of the tools as a set. Use fit visible content for steady reading of a document, page after page. Use the zoom tool for close looks at one area, then step back out. Use a plain zoom percentage when you want a fixed size, for example to compare two documents at the same scale side by side in tabs.

If text looks smaller than you expected after Ctrl+5, the page probably has something printed near its edges, a page number or a footer line perhaps, which counts as visible content. That is the command doing exactly what it says.

Zoom alongside the other tools

Zoom works with everything else in PDF by Zaweba. You can zoom right in while placing a comment or a signature, then fit the content again to read on. And because the app draws only the pages near where you are looking, zooming in on a large page stays quick.

Once you have used the zoom tool on a busy drawing, the old routine of nudging and scrolling feels slow. Keep Ctrl+5 for reading and the zoom tool for inspecting, and most zoom fiddling simply disappears.