What you'll do

Move around the map, measure distances and areas, read coordinates and the map scale, probe features by hovering, act on a feature through the canvas context menu, and get the map out of SWMMVis as an image or on paper.

Where to find it

Command	Menu	Ribbon tab	Shortcut
Pan	View	Home	—
Zoom In	View	Home	`Ctrl++` (platform Zoom-In key)
Zoom Out	View	Home	`Ctrl+-` (platform Zoom-Out key)
Zoom Extent	View	Home	`Ctrl+Shift+F`
Zoom To Selection	View	Home	`Ctrl+Shift+J`
Measure	View	Home	`Ctrl+Shift+M`
Map Image…	File	—	—
Print	File	—	`Ctrl+P`

The status bar carries the Coordinates readout, the Map Scale combo and the Coordinate Reference System button (see 06 — Coordinate Reference Systems). Right-clicking the canvas opens a context menu that depends on what is under the cursor.

FIGURE PLACEHOLDERdocs/manual/images/05_canvas_overview.png

The map canvas with a basemap; the SWMM network and the status-bar readouts

Step-by-step

How the canvas is put together

The canvas composites three stacked surfaces into one picture. A background worker renders every raster layer — basemaps, XYZ/WMS/WMTS tiles, GIS rasters — into an off-screen image buffer. A transparent overlay holds the interactive vector items (GIS vector features, 2D-mesh graphics, annotations) and handles clicks on them. A hardware-accelerated surface (Metal on macOS, Vulkan on Linux, Direct3D 11 on Windows) draws the heavy content: the 2D terrain mesh at the bottom, the 2D flood map above it, and the SWMM network on top.

What this means in practice:

During a pan or zoom gesture the previous buffers are shown shifted and scaled so the map never goes blank; the sharp version arrives when the drag stops (and, for tiles, part-way through a long drag).
The basemap, the layers and the selection highlight redraw separately, so cheap changes (a selection highlight) never wait behind expensive ones (a basemap redraw). The tuning knobs and how to trace a slow redraw are in A4 — Performance and Redraw Policy.
Hidden layers cost nothing — they are skipped entirely when the map redraws.

Navigating

These work whatever tool is active:

Input	Effect
Scroll wheel up / down	Zoom in / out by ×1.5 about the cursor
Middle-button drag	Pan (the cursor becomes a closed hand)
Two-finger pinch	Zoom about the pinch centre (touchscreen and precision touchpad)
`←` `→` `↑` `↓`	Pan by 10 % of the visible width or height
`Shift` + arrow key	Pan by 2 % — a fine nudge
`+` / `=`	Zoom in ×2
`-`	Zoom out ×2

And these are map tools — pick one and it stays active until you pick another:

Tool	Behaviour
Pan	Left-drag moves the map; the point under the cursor follows it. Each completed drag is one undo step.
Zoom In	Left-drag a rubber-band rectangle to zoom to it; right-drag zooms out; a plain click zooms in about the click point.
Zoom Out	The same tool in its zoom-out mode.

Zoom Extent fits every visible layer. Zoom To Selection fits the union of the currently selected SWMM objects, padded by 25 % of the selection's span; a single selected node or gage gets a fixed buffer instead so you don't end up at an absurd scale. With nothing selected it does nothing. Selection itself is covered in 09 — Selection and Search.

Every extent change goes on the map undo stack, so Ctrl+Z retraces your navigation.

FIGURE PLACEHOLDERdocs/manual/images/05_zoom_rubber_band.png

Zoom In tool dragging a rubber-band rectangle over part of the network

Reading position and scale

The Coordinates field on the status bar tracks the cursor in canvas CRS units. When a terrain raster is active in the Terrain toolbar, its sampled elevation is appended as a Z: value — converted into the model's vertical unit (ft or m), so it is directly comparable with node invert elevations — and is also painted next to the cursor on the canvas.

The Map Scale combo shows the current scale as 1:N. It is editable: pick one of the presets (1:100 through 1:25,000,000) or type a denominator and press Return to jump to exactly that scale, keeping the current centre. The computation is DPI-aware (correct on Retina/HiDPI screens) and CRS-aware — a geographic CRS uses the cosine-latitude approximation, a projected CRS its own linear unit.

A scale bar is drawn on the canvas itself. Its colour, line width, line style, font, units, corner, maximum length, label decimals and compact-notation behaviour are all set in Tools → Preferences → Map (see 04 — Preferences).

Hover probes and tooltips

Hover over a SWMM node, link, subcatchment or rain gage in any visible model layer and a tooltip appears after the usual delay, showing the element name in bold, its type, the node or link sub-type, its coordinates, and the vertex count for links and subcatchment polygons. The pick tolerance is about 12 pixels, and tooltips fire regardless of which tool is active.

With a 2D mesh loaded, the Mesh Editing toolbar carries its own hover probe: it reports the barycentric bed elevation under the cursor for the active mesh layer, sampled continuously as you move (see 19 — 2D Overland Flow: Meshes, Cell Parameters, Boundary Conditions and 1D–2D Coupling).

FIGURE PLACEHOLDERdocs/manual/images/05_hover_tooltip.png

Hover tooltip over a conduit showing its name; type and vertex count

Measure

View → Measure (Ctrl+Shift+M) activates the measure tool and shows a small floating panel over the canvas:

Control	What it does
Mode	`Distance` or `Area`.
Units	Distance: metres, kilometres, feet, US survey feet, miles, nautical miles, yards, international inches. Area: square metres, square kilometres, hectares, acres, square feet, square miles, square yards.
Total readout	The running measurement in the selected unit.
Clear	Discards the current measurement.

Left-click to add vertices. In Distance mode a cumulative label is drawn at each committed vertex; in Area mode the polygon is filled semi-transparently and labelled with its area as you drag. Double-click finishes the measurement; the next left-click starts a fresh one. Esc removes the last vertex while drawing, or clears a finished result.

Measurements are CRS-aware. In a geographic CRS the points are transformed to WGS-84 and measured with the Haversine formula (distance) or the spherical-excess formula (area). In a projected CRS the Euclidean value is converted with the CRS's own linear-unit factor. With a Local CRS the raw Euclidean value is reported with no unit conversion.

FIGURE PLACEHOLDERdocs/manual/images/05_measure_panel.png

The measure tool in Area mode with the floating Mode and Units panel

The canvas context menu

Right-clicking the canvas with the Select tool active opens a menu built around whatever is under the cursor. Right-click never changes the selection — the menu acts on the object you pointed at.

Over empty background the menu holds a single entry:

Item	What it does
Plot System Variable… ▸	Submenu of system-wide result variables; picking one opens a time-series plot. See 22 — Time-Series and Comparison Plots.

Over a node, link, subcatchment or rain gage:

Item	What it does
Zoom to Object	Frames the object. If the object is part of a multi-object selection, frames the whole selection instead.
Rainfall Visualization…	Rain gages only — opens the rainfall dialog focused on this gage (see 25 — Analysis Tools: Flow Balance, Travel Time, Rainfall Visualisation, 2D Cell Time Series).
Plot Time Series… ▸	Submenu of result variables valid for this object kind, including pollutant/species series. With two or more `.out` results layers loaded the menu gains a level: Plot Time Series ▸ <results layer> ▸ <variable>.
Convert To ▸	Nodes and links only. Lists the other kinds of the same family, plus Virtual Junction and — when the engine supports it — Inlet Junction. Targets whose engine eligibility rules are not met are greyed out with the failing rule as their tooltip.
Flip Direction	Links only. Swaps the upstream and downstream nodes without moving the link. Undoable.
Delete…	Selects the object under the cursor and runs the shared confirm-and-delete flow.

Type conversion and deletion are model edits — see 12 — Editing the Network on the Map.

FIGURE PLACEHOLDERdocs/manual/images/05_canvas_context_menu.png

Canvas context menu on a conduit with the Plot Time Series and Convert To submenus

Selection beacon

After a selection made from somewhere non-spatial — the Object Browser or an attribute table — the canvas flashes a locator at the selected features and leaves a fixed-size beacon behind, so a feature stays findable at model-wide zoom where its own highlight is sub-pixel. Any selection change from another source clears a standing beacon.

Export Map Image

File → Map Image… grabs the current canvas view and writes it to a file; the file dialog it opens is titled Export Map.

The file-type list offers PNG, SVG, AutoCAD DXF, Enhanced Metafile and EPA SWMM Map (.map), but only PNG is implemented today — choosing any of the others produces a message saying so and writes nothing. The PNG is captured at the canvas's on-screen size and resolution; there are no size or DPI options in this release. Successful exports are logged to the Message Logs panel.

Print

File → Print (Ctrl+P) prints the active map canvas, and nothing else. Reports, attribute tables, plots, profiles and legends have no print path of their own; to put one of those on paper, export or copy it and print from the receiving application.

The command opens the platform print dialog at high resolution, then draws the canvas into the printable area at the top left, scaled to fit and preserving its aspect ratio. Cancelling the dialog prints nothing.

The platform dialog is the page setup. Paper size, orientation, margins and scaling live there, and on macOS its preview pane is the only print preview — SWMMVis has no page-setup or print-preview dialog of its own, and no page-layout composer, header, footer or legend placement.

One thing is worth knowing before you print: the image sent to the printer is a grab of the canvas at its on-screen size, then enlarged into a high-resolution printer page. Print sharpness is therefore bounded by how large the map is on screen, not by the printer's resolution. Maximise the window — and widen the canvas by collapsing the docked panels — before printing anything you intend to keep.

If no project window is active, the command does nothing and writes Print: no active map view. to the Message Logs panel. A successful print is logged as Printed map view.

Copy the current view

Edit → Copy (Ctrl+C) is focus-aware, so the same keystroke copies whatever you are working in:

Focus	What lands on the clipboard
Attribute Table	the selected rows as tab-separated text, ready to paste into a spreadsheet
Message Logs	the selected log rows as text
anything else	the active map canvas as an image

The map image is the same on-screen-resolution grab that Print uses, so the same advice applies — enlarge the canvas first if you want a crisp paste.

As with printing, copying the map with no active project window logs Copy: no active map view. and does nothing.

FIGURE PLACEHOLDERdocs/manual/images/05_export_map_dialog.png

The Export Map file dialog with the PNG filter selected

The Overview Map panel

An overview-map navigator — a mini-map of the full model extent with a draggable viewport rectangle — exists in the code base but is not wired into the application in this release: it has no entry in View → Panels and is never created. Use Zoom Extent and the map-scale combo instead.

Tips and gotchas

Wheel zoom always wins. Vertical wheel scrolling zooms no matter which tool is active; only horizontal (trackpad) scrolling is passed to the tool.
Middle-drag pan is global too — you don't have to leave the tool you are using to reposition the map.
The arrow keys pan the canvas whenever it has keyboard focus. No map tool claims them, so this never steals a keystroke from an editing tool (those use Esc, Return, Delete and letters).
Typing a scale only accepts a denominator. 5000 and 1:5000 both work; anything else is rejected by the field's validator.
The scale readout is physical, not pixel-based. Two monitors with different DPI show the same 1:N for the same view.
Undo covers navigation. If a stray click sent you somewhere unexpected, Ctrl+Z puts the extent back.
Export Map only writes PNG. For a vector drawing of the network, export the layers to a GIS format instead (see A2 — File Formats).
If the map redraws sluggishly on a large model, the rendering preferences and the redraw instrumentation in A4 — Performance and Redraw Policy are the first place to look — not the map tools.

02 — The Interface — the window layout, ribbon and status bar
06 — Coordinate Reference Systems — the CRS button, canvas CRS and on-the-fly reprojection
07 — Layers and Data Sources — what can be put on the canvas and in what order
08 — Styling, Labels and Legends — how the things on the canvas are painted
09 — Selection and Search — selecting features and tracing the network
12 — Editing the Network on the Map — editing the network on the canvas and annotations
19 — 2D Overland Flow: Meshes, Cell Parameters, Boundary Conditions and 1D–2D Coupling — 2D mesh display and the mesh hover probe
21 — Results Layers, Result Styling and Animation — animating results on the map
A4 — Performance and Redraw Policy — redraw policy and rendering settings
A1 — Keyboard Shortcuts — the complete shortcut list