Prezi zoomed away
by Laszlo Laufer
The problem
Zooming away:
When you open your prezi, it appears empty after loading.
You click on the Home button on the zoom bar, and the prezi zooms out and some parts or all of your content disappears.
Clogging:
When you zoom in or out of the prezi, it gets “clogged” and does not zoom smoothly.
Solution for new prezis
Prezi released an editor feature in May 2011 to prevent creating zoomed away prezis by defining the borders of the zoomable space. This solution woks for new prezis you create. Since the release, you can't add content to the editor beyond the limits. If you zoom too much, a grey banner will pop up saying you cannot zoom any further.
If you scale up or shrink objects beyond limits, another pop-up message will warn you and undo your latest action.
If you have existing prezis that have content beyond the zoomable space and therefore zoomed away, please continue reading.
Solution for existing prezis
Quick workaround
If the problem appears for the first time, and you haven’t closed your prezi yet, try to undo your changes until you have found the last state without the clogged effect.Step-by-step workaround
We recommend reading the description below to understand the nature of the problem before starting to work on the solution.
These are the steps that we follow to recover prezis that are posted in our Community forum. We offer them here so you can save time by trying to recover your own prezi.
1. Click on the Home button of the zoom bar.
2. Zoom out a little by clicking (-) on the zoom bar one time. Now all of your content is on the screen, but you probably don’t see every piece since some parts might be very small.
3. Make sure you are in "Write" mode. Press Shift and drag the mouse to create a rectangular area in the middle of your screen (which will appear to be empty). Release the mouse: if you see a Zebra after the selection, it means you have found content.
4. First try to scale up (enlarge) the selection with the middle ring of the Zebra. If you succeed, you will see some parts of your content get bigger. Don’t unselect. Zoom out a little by clicking (-) on the zoom bar one time, and move the selection aside using the middle part of the Zebra.
5. If you did not succeed with step 4 and you could not scale up the selection, you have to delete the selection. You will probably lose content, but this content cannot be recovered from your prezi.
6. Now click again on the Home button of the zoom bar. In one corner, you will see the content you just enlarged, but there might be empty areas in other parts of your screen. Start looking for other hidden parts of your prezi by following steps 1, 2, 3, and 4 again.
7. If you don’t find anything in the empty areas between the visible content or after clicking on the Home button on the zoom bar (and the visible content fits your screen) then you are done and have successfully recovered the prezi!
Understanding the problem
If un-doing your changes does not solve the issue, please first read through the description of the problem and then follow the procedures described in the “Step-by-Step” section above.
Prezi is a zoomable space, where every text, image and object has a size besides a horizontal and vertical position on the canvas. When you enlarge, scale down or move an object these coordinates are recalculated. Unfortunately, there are technical limitations on how many digits these calculated numbers can have.
When a prezi reaches these technical limitations, it starts to behave erratically. This happens when the horizontal or vertical distance between two objects, or the size difference between the smallest and the largest object is too big. Since it is relatively easy to zoom deep into a prezi and place an object there, usually it is the size difference (and not the horizontal or vertical position) which is causing the problem.
Mathematical background
A good way to imagine the available space in a prezi is to imagine it as a glass box, rather than a flat surface. You would place some text on top of it, some at the bottom. Now, if you look into this box from above, the texts on top would appear larger, the texts on the bottom smaller.
The limits of this box (x, y, z) are the limits you have in Prezi. If you place objects outside of these, the problems described above will occur.
