A tablet is a great middle ground: a big enough screen for real work, with touch for quick, direct editing. livediagram runs in the tablet's browser, no app needed, and adapts to how much screen room it has at the moment.
It adapts to your screen
livediagram chooses its layout from the size of the editor on screen, not from the kind of device:
- On a screen at least 640 pixels wide (which includes almost every tablet, in portrait as well as landscape) you get the full layout, the same as a computer: the editor mode switch, the Map, and the Spotlight and Slide Deck tools. On a smaller tablet held upright (768 pixels wide or less), an empty tab also opens zoomed out to 60% so you start with an overview (a tab with content opens fitted to it).
- Only a narrower window (a tablet running livediagram in a narrow split-screen pane, say), or an unusually short touch screen, switches to the compact, touch-first layout described in the mobile guide, where the menu button gets a card of its own and the palette strip's tiles swipe sideways.
So rotating a tablet usually keeps the same layout; landscape just gives the canvas more width. In Draw mode, Dock Position in Settings can move the drawing dock to the bottom, closer to hand.
Touch works everywhere
However the tablet is held, pinch to zoom, tap to select, drag an element to move it, and press and hold for its menu. Drag handles get extra padding on touch so they are easy to hit. Because the screen is large, the editor starts on the Select tool, as on a computer (Plan starts on Hand, as it does everywhere), so dragging empty canvas draws a selection box. To move around, switch to Hand in the Palette's selection-mode dropdown and drag, or tap or drag on the Map.
Touch has no hover, so style previews (which show as you rest a pointer on a colour) don't appear: a tap applies the change, and undo takes it back.
Add a keyboard for more
A few things are built for a physical keyboard. If you pair a keyboard with your tablet, they come back:
- Keyboard shortcuts for tools and actions like undo, copy, and duplicate.
- Held-key shortcuts, like Shift to keep an element's proportions while resizing, or to add to a selection.
Without a keyboard you can still do all of this through the palette and on-screen controls; a keyboard just adds the faster way.
Holding the tablet in landscape gives the canvas the most room, which is the most comfortable way to do detailed work on a tablet.
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