Scissor user manual

Getting started

Scissor opens in a browser tab. There is no account to make and nothing to install before you begin: the drawing engine is compiled to WebAssembly and runs on your own machine, so your artwork is never uploaded anywhere. On your first visit a bar at the foot of the window asks whether Scissor may count visits with Google Analytics; declining loads no analytics at all, and you can change your mind later under Help > Privacy Settings….

Shortcuts below are written in the macOS form. On Windows and Linux, read ⌘ as Ctrl and ⌥ as Alt; ⇧ is Shift.

What you see

Across the top sit the menu bar and, beneath it, the Control bar, which changes with what you have selected and holds fill, stroke, weight, opacity and the X, Y, W and H of the selection. The tools run down the left edge; the panel dock is on the right. Between them is the canvas, with a tab for each open document above it and a status bar below showing the zoom level, the active board, the current tool and the name of the last undoable step.

With no document open, the canvas shows a start screen with New Document… and Open…; double-clicking anywhere on it opens a file. Press Tab to hide the panels and give the artwork the full window, and again to bring them back. Hold the space bar at any time to pan.

Making your first document

Choose File > New… (⌥⌘N). The dialog groups blank presets under Print, Web, Mobile, Film & Video and Art & Illustration; click a card to load its size, or double-click it to create the document at once. On the right you can set the document name, width and height, the units, and portrait or landscape orientation. Boards, Columns and Spacing lay out more than one board in a grid. Under Bleed, the link button keeps all four sides equal; switch it off to set them separately. Advanced holds the colour mode (RGB or CMYK) and the resolution used by raster effects. Enter creates the document, Esc closes the dialog.

Drawing a first shape

Press M for the Rectangle tool or L for the Ellipse tool and drag on the canvas. Hold ⇧ while dragging to keep the shape square or circular, and ⌥ to draw out from the centre rather than from the corner. A single click instead of a drag opens a small dialog, so you can type an exact width and height. With the Polygon or Star tool, the up and down arrow keys change the number of sides or points as you drag.

The fill and stroke swatches sit at the foot of the toolbar. X moves the focus between them, ⇧X swaps the two colours, D returns to the default white fill and black stroke, and / sets the focused one to none. Press V for the Selection tool to move and resize what you have drawn.

Saving

Scissor documents are .cut files. File > Save (⌘S) asks once where the file should go and, in browsers that support direct file access, writes back to that same file every time after. Browsers without it save the document to your downloads folder instead. Save As… is ⇧⌘S and Save a Copy… is ⌥⌘S. To hand work to another program, use File > Export.

While a document has unsaved changes Scissor keeps a copy in the browser's own storage every few seconds, and again whenever the tab is hidden or closed. If the tab goes away before you save, your next visit offers the work back with a Recover notice.

Installing Scissor

Choose Help > Install Scissor… to install it as an application. It then opens in its own window without browser chrome, works offline, and can be set as the program that opens .cut files. If your browser does not offer the prompt, use its own install option in the address bar or menu.

The interface

Scissor fills the browser window with one editing surface: a menu bar and a control bar across the top, the tool palette down the left, the canvas in the middle with the panel dock beside it, and a status bar along the foot. Everything runs on your own machine, so a document stays where you put it.

Shortcuts here are written in the macOS form. On Windows and Linux, read ⌘ as Ctrl and ⌥ as Alt; ⇧ is Shift and ⌃ is Control.

The menu bar

Nine menus run along the top: File, Edit, Object, Type, Select, Effect, View, Window and Help. A tick beside an item means the setting is on; an item drawn in grey cannot be used at the moment. The Help menu opens with a search field that finds any command in any menu and shows the path to it, which is quicker than remembering where something lives. At the right of the bar sits a readout of the current document: its name, an asterisk while there are unsaved changes, the zoom percentage, and whether you are in Preview or Outline.

The control bar

The strip under the menu bar changes with what you have selected. It names the selection (Path, Group, Type, No Selection and so on), then gives you the fill and stroke swatches, the stroke weight, the opacity, and the X, Y, W and H of the selection. A live rectangle or polygon gains a corner radius field. Type into any of these fields and press Enter, or leave the field, to apply the value; ↑ and ↓ step it, with ⇧ for ten times the step, and dragging the small label beside a field scrubs the value.

The tool palette

The tools sit in a single column on the left, grouped by what they do and divided by thin rules. A slot with a mark in its lower corner holds more than one tool: hold the button down, or right-click it, to open the flyout and pick another. The tooltip gives the tool's name and its shortcut. Double-clicking a tool that has options opens them. Below the tools are the fill and stroke boxes: X moves between them, ⇧X swaps the two, D returns to the default white fill and black stroke, and / sets the front one to none.

Tabs and the canvas

Open documents appear as tabs above the canvas. A tab shows the document's name with an asterisk while it has unsaved changes; click the tab to switch, or the × to close it. When you enter a group to work inside it, a breadcrumb bar appears under the tabs; click the ‹ or press Esc to step back out.

Below that is the canvas. ⌘R shows the rulers, which measure in the document's units from the top left corner of the active board and carry a marker that follows the pointer. Drag out of a ruler to pull a guide onto the artwork; drop a guide back on a ruler to be rid of it. Hold Space for the Hand tool while you drag, or drag with the middle button. The wheel scrolls, and the wheel with ⌘ or ⌥ held zooms about the pointer. ⌘0 fits the board in the window, ⌥⌘0 fits all of them, and ⌘1 returns to actual size.

Boards and the pasteboard

Boards are what Scissor calls artboards: the white rectangles that hold the artwork you intend to keep. Each carries its name above its top left corner, and the active board is drawn with a stronger frame than the rest. If the document has a bleed, it is drawn around the board as a red dashed rectangle. Add one from Object › Boards › New Board, draw and reshape them with the Board tool (⇧O), and set a board's size and name in Board Options. The Boards panel lists them all, and the status bar has a menu for jumping between them.

The grey surround is the pasteboard. It is part of the document, so you can park a sketch, an offcut or a colour test there and it is saved with the file, but when you export a board only what falls inside that board's rectangle is written out.

The panel dock

Panels live in the column on the right, stacked in groups with a tab for each panel. Open one from the Window menu, where it is ticked while its group is on screen. Click a tab to bring its panel forward. Drag a tab onto another group's tab strip to move it there, or drag it out of the dock to leave it floating over the canvas; drag a group's tab strip to lift the whole group out, and drop it back over the dock to put it home. A floating group can be resized from its bottom right corner. The × at the right of a tab strip closes that group, and Window › Reset Panels puts the whole arrangement back to its starting state. Your layout is remembered between sessions. Tab hides the tool palette, the control bar and the dock so that only the artwork is left; press it again to bring them back.

The status bar

The bar at the foot holds a zoom menu with the usual steps, a menu of the document's boards, the name of the current tool, and, at the right, the action that ⌘Z would undo.

Light and dark

Scissor follows your system setting for light and dark. To fix it one way, choose View › Appearance and pick System, Light or Dark. The choice is remembered, and it carries through to the canvas as well as the panels: the pasteboard, the rulers and the board labels are all drawn to suit the theme you are in.

The tools

The toolbar runs down the left of the window. Each slot holds one tool or a group of related ones; press and hold a slot to open its flyout and pick another tool from the group. A tool's shortcut is a single key press, and it works whenever you are not typing into text or a field.

The shortcuts below are written in the macOS form. On Windows, read ⌥ as Alt, ⌘ as Ctrl and ⇧ as Shift.

Three habits apply to nearly every tool:

• Hold the space bar to borrow the Hand tool, and let go to return to what you were using.
• Hold ⌘ to borrow the Selection tool in the same way. The Free Transform tool is the exception: it reads ⌘ itself.
• Esc abandons a drag or a path you are part way through drawing, leaving the artwork as it was.

A few slots are listed for completeness but have no behaviour behind them yet. The toolbar marks those as coming soon and the engine refuses them.

Selection

With an object selected, the bounding box carries eight handles. Drag a handle to scale, holding ⇧ to keep the proportions and ⌥ to scale about the centre; drag just outside a corner to rotate, with ⇧ snapping to 45°. Double-click steps into a group and works inside it, double-click text to edit it, double-click a symbol instance to edit the symbol every instance draws, and double-click away from the artwork to step back out.

Live shapes carry their own widgets: drag a corner widget to round every corner of the shape at once, or ⌥-click it to step the corner on to the next kind.

Direct Selection and Group Selection

The Direct Selection tool also drags the crossings of an envelope's mesh, bending what the envelope holds, and it rounds one corner of a live shape at a time rather than all of them.

Magic Wand

Lasso

The pen family

While the Pen tool has a path on the go, Enter or Esc finishes it and Backspace takes back the last anchor.

Curvature

Type

The side knobs of the Touch Type box stretch the character one way only: across for width, along for height.

Lines, arcs, spirals and grids

The two grid tools make one path per line, so every line stays selectable on its own.

Rectangles, ellipses and other shapes

A click rather than a drag with any of these tools opens a dialog, so you can give the shape exact measurements instead. The Flare tool answers a click with a flare the size its options ask for.

Brushes

[ and ] make the brush smaller and larger.

Pencil and the path menders

[ and ] resize the Smooth, Path Eraser and Join brushes. With artwork selected these three work on the selection alone; with nothing selected they work on any path they reach.

Erasing and cutting

Rotate and Reflect

Both tools start from the middle of the selection, and choosing something else puts the reference point back there.

Scale, Shear and Reshape

With individual anchors selected, these tools transform those anchors rather than whole objects.

Width and the liquify brushes

All seven liquify brushes take [ and ] for size, and ⇧ with those same keys — { and } — for how hard they push.

Free Transform and Puppet Warp

Free Transform scales and turns about its reference point, which you can drag anywhere, even outside the box; drop it near one of the box's nine usual places and it settles there. While scaling, ⇧ keeps the proportions and ⌥ scales about the centre rather than the reference point; while turning, ⇧ snaps to 45°. On a corner handle, ⌘ distorts that corner on its own and ⌘⌥⇧ distorts in perspective, with the neighbouring corner mirroring the drag; the widget beside the box sets the same two modes and the constrain switch. Changing a modifier part way through a drag switches at once, without letting go.

Puppet Warp reads Delete as removing the selected pins rather than the artwork, and ⌘A as selecting every pin. Each drag is one step to undo, and undo brings the pins back with the artwork they went with. Type, images and symbol instances cannot be distorted, and are left as they are.

Shape Builder and Live Paint

Perspective

While the grid is showing, the Rectangle, Rounded Rectangle, Ellipse and Rectangular Grid tools draw onto the active plane rather than flat, and 1 to 4 pick the plane from those tools too.

Mesh

Gradient

On the annotator, drag a stop along the axis to move it, drag a diamond to shift the blend between two stops, click the axis to add a stop in the colour it already is there, and pull a stop well off the axis to throw it away, as long as two are left. Delete removes the stop you last touched. On a freeform gradient the tool works in colour points instead: click the artwork to add one in the fill colour, and drag a point to move it.

Eyedropper and Measure

Blend

The symbolism brushes

All eight take [ and ] for brush size and { and } for how hard the brush works. They act on the instances in the selection, or on every editable instance when nothing is selected.

The graph tools

While you drag out any of them, ⌥ draws from the centre and ⇧ keeps the box square.

Boards

Delete removes the active board, as long as one is left.

Slices

Moving the view

Zoom

Drawing and editing paths

Shortcuts are written in their macOS form. On Windows, read ⌘ as Ctrl, ⌥ as Alt and ⇧ as Shift.

The pen tool

The Pen tool (P) builds a path point by point. Click to drop a corner anchor; press and drag instead and the anchor keeps handles, so the path leaves it as a curve. Hold ⇧ while you drag to hold the handle to 45° steps, and hold ⌥ to move only the outgoing handle, which turns the anchor into a corner and frees the next segment from the last one.

While a path is open the tool changes as you move over it. Over the first anchor it closes the path, over a segment it adds an anchor, and over an existing anchor it removes one. With no path in progress, moving over the loose end of an open path picks that path up so you carry on drawing from it. Enter or Esc ends the path and leaves it open; Delete removes the anchor you last placed. Enter or Esc ends the path and leaves it open; Delete removes the anchor you last placed.

The same slot holds Add Anchor Point (+), Delete Anchor Point (−) and the Anchor Point tool (⇧C). With the Anchor Point tool, drag from a corner anchor to pull out a matched pair of handles, or drag a single handle to break the pair so the two sides move apart.

The curvature tool

The Curvature tool (⇧~) fits a smooth curve through the points you click, with a preview running to the pointer as you go. ⌥-click to drop a corner point rather than a smooth one, and double-click any point to switch it between the two. Drag a point to move it and the curve refits. Click the first point to close the shape, or press Enter to finish. Delete removes the last point and Esc abandons the path.

Anchors, handles and the Direct Selection tool

The Direct Selection tool (A) works on the parts of a path. Click an anchor to select it, ⇧-click to add or remove one, or drag a marquee over empty space to catch every anchor inside it. Dragging selected anchors moves them; ⇧ restricts the move to 45° steps.

Drag a handle to change the curve on its side. Handles that belong to a smooth anchor move together, so the curve stays continuous; hold ⌥ as you drag to break that link and steer one side alone, and ⇧ to hold the handle to an angle. You can also drag a segment itself: a curved segment bends under the pointer, and a straight one carries both of its anchors along.

The Group Selection tool shares this slot and picks whole objects out of a group rather than anchors.

Live shapes and their widgets

Rectangles, rounded rectangles, ellipses and polygons stay live: they keep their parameters and rebuild their path whenever you change one. While you drag a shape out, ⇧ makes it regular and ⌥ draws it from the centre. The arrow keys work during the drag too — up and right add, down and left subtract — changing the sides of a polygon, the points of a star, or the corner radius of a rounded rectangle.

Select a single live shape and small round handles appear just inside its corners; they are hidden when the shape is too small on screen to show them clearly. Drag one with the Selection tool (V) to round all the corners at once, or with Direct Selection to round only the corner you are holding. ⌥-click a corner handle to step it through round, inverted and chamfer — again all four corners with the Selection tool, one corner with Direct Selection.

An ellipse shows a square handle instead: one on a whole ellipse, and one at each end of the pie once you have opened one. Drag one to open a wedge out of the shape, with ⇧ snapping the angle to 15° steps; bringing the end back round to the start restores the whole ellipse. The Properties panel holds the same values as numbers: radius and corner type, per-corner radii, polygon sides, and pie start and end in degrees.

Shape builder and pathfinder

The Shape Builder tool (⇧M) works on two or more selected paths. It divides their overlaps into regions and highlights whichever one the pointer is over; drag a line across several regions to merge them into one object, which takes the appearance of the shape it came from, or ⌥-drag across them to delete them.

The Pathfinder panel (⇧⌘F9) does the same work as commands. The shape modes are Unite, Minus Front, Intersect and Exclude; below them sit Divide, Trim, Merge, Crop, Minus Back and Outline. The results keep curves rather than flattening them to line segments. Effect › Pathfinder applies Add, Intersect, Exclude, Subtract and Minus Back as live effects instead, leaving the original objects intact.

Object › Path gathers the rest: Join (⌘J), Average (⌥⌘J), Outline Stroke, Offset Path, Reverse Path Direction, Simplify, Add and Remove Anchor Points, Split Into Grid and Clean Up.

Compound paths and clipping masks

Object › Compound Path › Make (⌘8) folds the selected paths into one object filled by the even-odd rule, so an inner contour cuts a hole through the one around it. The result takes the appearance of the lowest object in the selection. Release (⌥⇧⌘8) gives each contour back as a path of its own.

Object › Clipping Mask › Make (⌘7) uses the topmost selected object, which must be a path, to clip everything below it. Scissor puts them all into a clipping group and clears the mask path's own fill and stroke. Release (⌥⌘7) turns the clipping group back into an ordinary group, so nothing is clipped any more and every object, the mask path included, stays where it was. Make Opacity Mask in the same submenu masks by tone rather than by outline.

Smart guides and snapping

Smart guides (View › Smart Guides, ⌘U) watch the visible artwork and the boards as you draw or drag. What you are moving snaps to the edges, centres and anchors of its neighbours, and a line appears back to whatever it lined up with, labelled with the kind of match — anchor, center, corner or align.

Two further guides appear on their own. When the object you are moving would sit at the same distance from its neighbours as they sit from each other, it snaps there and the two equal gaps are drawn with the measurement shown; this works both for continuing a run of evenly spaced objects and for centring one in the gap between two. And when you drag away from a starting point, the direction snaps onto a construction line every 45° from the constrain angle, drawn as a long line with the angle beside it.

Snap to Point (⌥⌘') and Snap to Grid (⇧⌘') are separate switches in the View menu. With Snap to Grid on, everything lands on the grid subdivision and the smart guides stand aside.

Colour, strokes and appearance

Shortcuts below are written in their macOS form. On Windows, read ⌘ as Ctrl, ⌥ as Alt and ⇧ as Shift.

Fill and stroke

Two overlapping chips at the foot of the toolbar hold the fill and the stroke. Click either to open a colour picker; the one in front is the side that keys and panels act on. Press X to bring the other side forward, ⇧X to swap the two paints, / to set the front side to none, and D to return to a white fill, a black stroke and a 1 pt weight. The Eyedropper (I) copies a whole appearance from the object you click; hold ⇧ to take only its colour into the active side, or ⌥ to push the selection's appearance onto the object under the pointer.

The Color and Swatches panels

The Color panel (F6) holds sliders in Grayscale, RGB, HSB, CMYK or Web Safe RGB, a hexadecimal field, and a spectrum you can click or drag across. Invert and Complement rework the current colour. In Web Safe RGB a warning triangle appears when the colour is not web safe; click it to snap to the nearest one. When the active side is painted with a global swatch, a tint slider appears above the sliders.

The Swatches panel lists the document's swatches as a grid or a list. A click paints the active side; ⇧-click picks a run and ⌘-click adds or removes one. Double-click a swatch for Swatch Options, where it can be a process or a spot colour; Global keeps the artwork linked to a process swatch, so recolouring the swatch repaints everything painted with it, and spot colours are always global. Every document also starts with a fixed [Registration] swatch, which has no colour type of its own. Drag swatches onto a colour group to file them, or make a group from what you have picked. The panel menu adds the colours already used in the document or in the selection, and selects every swatch nothing uses.

Gradients

The Gradient panel (⌘F9) makes linear, radial and freeform gradients. Click the thumbnail to fill the selection, set the type, reverse the ramp, and work the ramp itself: click it to add a stop, drag a stop to move it, drag a diamond to shift where two colours meet, and set Opacity, Location, Angle and, for radial gradients, Aspect. A freeform gradient can string its points into lines.

With the Gradient tool (G) the same controls sit on the artwork. Drag across an object to lay down the axis, holding ⇧ to hold it to 45° steps. Click the axis to add a stop in the colour it already has there, drag a stop along it, and pull a stop well clear of the axis to throw it away. Drag a diamond to move the midpoint, and drag the round start knob or the square end knob to move either end. Delete removes the stop you last touched. On a freeform gradient, click the artwork to drop a colour point, drag one to move it, and press Delete to take it away.

Strokes, brushes and patterns

The Stroke panel (⌘F10) sets weight, butt, round or projecting caps, mitre, round or bevel corners with a mitre limit, and alignment to the centre, inside or outside of the path. The profile menu tapers the stroke and draws the taper beside it; you can run a profile the other way, save a hand-shaped stroke as a profile, or delete one you made. Dashed Line takes three dash and gap pairs. The Width tool (⇧W) shapes a stroke directly: drag away from the path to widen it there, towards it to narrow it, leaving a width point behind.

The Brushes panel (F5) holds calligraphic, scatter, art, bristle and pattern brushes. Click one to paint the selected paths with it; the Paintbrush uses whichever is current. Double-click for its options, or remove the brush to return strokes to plain lines.

Turn artwork into a tile with Object › Pattern › Make, then fill any shape with it. Tile Options sets the tile type, brick offset, size and spacing. Edit Pattern opens the tile in place, with the copies repeating around it as you work; click Done Editing in the Patterns panel when the tile is right.

Appearance, styles and transparency

The Appearance panel (⇧F6) lists a single object's fills and strokes, topmost first, with any live effects above them. Each row has an eye to hide it, a paint chip, an opacity field, a stroke weight where it applies, and arrows to move it up or down the stack. Add Fill and Add Stroke put another one on top. Object › Expand Appearance bakes the stack into plain artwork.

The Graphic Styles panel (⇧F5) keeps the fills and strokes you save from the selection. Click a chip to apply it; ⌥-click to delete it.

The Transparency panel (⇧⌘F10) sets opacity and the blending mode, from Normal through Multiply, Screen, Overlay and Difference to Hue, Saturation, Color and Luminosity. Isolate Blending and Knockout Group govern how a group blends with what is beneath it. Make Mask turns the topmost selected object into an opacity mask: where it is light the artwork shows, where it is dark it fades out.

Recolouring artwork

Edit › Edit Colors › Recolor Artwork… lists every colour in the selection with how often it is used. Click the chip on the right of a row to choose what that colour becomes, or the arrow between them to leave it alone. Hue, Saturation and Brightness sliders shift the lot together, and two buttons shuffle the order or randomise saturation and brightness. The artwork updates as you go, and Reset returns to the colours it started with. The same submenu also offers Blend Front to Back, Convert to Grayscale, Invert Colors and Saturate.

Type

Type in Scissor stays live: you can re-edit the words, the font and the spacing at any point, and the text is drawn straight onto the canvas as you type. The shortcuts below are written in their macOS form; on Windows read ⌘ as Ctrl, ⌥ as Alt and ⇧ as Shift.

Making type

The type tools share one slot in the toolbar.

Click existing type with any of the type tools except Touch Type to put the cursor in it, or double-click it with the Selection Tool (V). Press Escape, or click away, to stop editing. With the plain Type Tool, clicking an open path attaches type to that path rather than starting a new block. Use Type > Type Orientation to turn existing type between horizontal and vertical.

Type on a path

Click a path with the Type on a Path Tool. The path becomes the baseline and stops being artwork in its own right, so it is no longer filled or stroked. Select the result and three brackets appear: one at the start, one at the end and one in the middle. Drag the start or end bracket to move where the type begins and ends along the path, drag the middle bracket to slide the whole run along, and drag the middle bracket across to the other side of the path to flip the type over. Type on a path takes no line breaks, so Return does nothing while you edit it.

Touch Type

Pick the Touch Type Tool and click a character. A box appears around that one character with a knob at each corner, one on the right-hand side, one at the bottom and one floating above. Drag a corner to scale in both directions, the side knob for width alone, the bottom knob for height alone, and the top knob to turn the character. Hold ⇧ while dragging a corner to keep the proportions, or while turning to snap the angle. Backspace or Delete puts the character back where the text set it, and Escape drops the pick. The text is still text throughout: you can carry on editing the words around the character you moved.

Character and Paragraph

The Character panel (⌘T) holds the font family, weight and italic, size, leading, tracking in thousandths of an em, the four alignments and the writing direction. Leaving leading at 0 gives automatic leading at 120% of the size. Under OpenType are buttons for standard ligatures, discretionary ligatures, all caps, small caps, superscript, subscript, fractions, ordinals, swash and kerning, with a menu for figure style: default, tabular lining, proportional oldstyle, proportional lining or tabular oldstyle. Ligatures, kerning, caps and super- and subscript are drawn on the canvas; discretionary ligatures, figure styles, fractions, ordinals and swash are carried into SVG export, which the canvas cannot show.

The Paragraph panel (⌥⌘T) has seven alignment buttons — left, centre, right, and justification with the last line left, centred, right or justified as well — along with left, right and first-line indents, space before and after, and a hyphenation switch. A negative first-line indent hangs the line out. Indents and spacing apply to area type; point type is set from its own anchor.

The Glyphs panel (Type > Glyphs, ⌥⇧F11) lists the characters of the current font by set, from Basic Latin through Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, punctuation, currency, arrows and more, and keeps the ones you have used recently. Double-click a glyph to type it at the text cursor; with no cursor in any type, it is copied to the clipboard instead.

Threading and text wrap

Select two or more area type objects and choose Type > Threaded Text > Create. Their text is joined into one story that flows from frame to frame, back to front, and is always edited from the first frame. Each frame shows a port at its top left and bottom right, with a line drawn to the frame the text continues in; a red plus in place of the outgoing port means more text than the frame can hold. Release Selection takes the selected frames out of their thread, and Remove Threading breaks the thread with each frame keeping the text it was showing.

To push type away from a shape, select the shape and choose Object > Text Wrap > Make. The wrap follows the object's outline, not its bounding box. Text Wrap Options… sets the offset in pixels and can invert the wrap so the type runs inside the shape instead of around it; Release removes it.

Outlines

Select some type and choose Type > Create Outlines (⇧⌘O) to turn it into paths. The letterforms are traced from the font's own glyphs at high resolution with corner-aware curve fitting, and the result keeps the type's fill, stroke, name, opacity and blending mode. The words are no longer editable afterwards, so keep a copy if you may need to change them, or undo with ⌘Z.

Right-to-left and Arabic

The Character panel's direction menu offers Auto, Left to Right and Right to Left. On Auto the direction is read from the text itself, so Arabic or Hebrew flows right to left without being set. Arabic letters take their joined forms, and a run of Latin words inside a right-to-left line keeps its own left-to-right order. Right-to-left text works on a path as well as in point and area type, and the on-canvas editor follows the same direction as the finished artwork.

Moving, transforming and arranging

Shortcuts below are written in their macOS form. On Windows and Linux, read ⌘ as Ctrl, ⌥ as Alt and ⇧ as Shift.

Selecting and moving

The Selection Tool (V) picks whole objects, the Direct Selection Tool (A) picks anchor points, and the Group Selection Tool picks one object inside a group and then, on each further click, the group around it. Shift-click adds an object to the selection or drops it again. Drag on empty canvas to marquee, and hold ⇧ to add what the marquee catches.

Drag a selected object to move it. Holding ⌥ leaves a copy behind and drags that instead. Holding ⇧ constrains the move to 45° steps from the constrain angle set in Preferences, and turns off snapping; without ⇧ the selection snaps to nearby edges, centres and angles. Arrow keys nudge by the keyboard increment, ⇧ with an arrow by ten times that, and ⌥ with an arrow nudges a copy.

The selection's bounding box carries eight handles. Drag one to scale; ⇧ keeps the proportions and ⌥ scales about the centre rather than the opposite handle. Just outside a corner the pointer enters the rotation zone: drag there to turn the selection about the box's centre, with ⇧ snapping to 45°. Object › Transform › Reset Bounding Box squares the box up again after a rotation.

The Transform panel and numeric transforms

The Transform panel (⇧F8) shows X, Y, W and H in pixels for the selection; type a value and press Return to set it. Below them, the ⟳ field rotates by an angle and the ⧄ field shears by one, each returning to zero once applied. The Properties panel repeats X/Y/W/H with a rotation field and buttons to flip horizontally or vertically.

Object › Transform holds the numeric commands: Move… (⇧⌘M), Rotate…, Reflect…, Scale… and Shear…, each with a Copy box that applies the change to a duplicate. Transform Each… (⌥⇧⌘D) scales, moves, rotates and reflects every selected object about its own centre. Transform Again (⌘D) repeats the last one.

Rotate, Reflect, Scale and Shear

The Rotate (R), Reflect (O), Scale (S) and Shear tools all work about a reference point, drawn as a small crosshair. It starts at the centre of the selection; click anywhere to move it there, and selecting something else puts it back. Then drag on the canvas to turn, mirror, scale or skew about that point. ⇧ constrains: 45° steps for rotating and reflecting, equal horizontal and vertical for scaling, one axis for shearing. Holding ⌥ during the drag transforms a copy and leaves the original. ⌥-click places the reference point and opens that tool's numeric dialog with the point already set.

The Free Transform tool

The Free Transform Tool (E) puts everything on one bounding box. Drag inside the box to move it, drag a handle to scale, and drag just outside a corner to rotate, with ⇧ snapping to 45°.

A small widget floats beside the box with four buttons, each naming itself when you hover over it: Constrain, Free Transform, Perspective Distort and Free Distort. Constrain makes scaling proportional without holding ⇧ — with it on, ⇧ frees the proportions instead. The two distortion modes leave only the four corner handles.

You can reach the same distortions from the keyboard while staying in Free Transform mode. Hold ⌘ on an edge handle to shear along that edge. Hold ⌘ on a corner to distort it freely, on its own; add ⇧ to constrain the corner's travel to 45°. Hold ⌘⌥⇧ on a corner for perspective, where the neighbouring corner mirrors the drag. Pressing or releasing a modifier part way through a drag switches the action at once, and the name it ends up with — Scale, Shear, Perspective Distort or Free Distort — is what the step is called in the History panel afterwards. Type, placed images and symbol instances cannot be distorted; they are left as they are, and Scissor says so.

The reference point sits in the middle of the box as a crosshair, and you can drag it anywhere — it moves nothing by itself. The box then rotates and scales about it, and it travels with the artwork when you move the selection. Drop it near one of the box's nine points — the corners, the edge midpoints or the centre — and it settles onto that point. Holding ⌥ while scaling ignores a placed reference point and scales about the centre.

Aligning, distributing and arranging

The Align panel (⇧F7) aligns the selection left, centre, right, top, middle or bottom; distributes objects by their tops, centres, bottoms, left edges, centres or right edges; and distributes the space between them vertically or horizontally. The menu beside it chooses whether to align to the selection or to the board. The same six alignments appear under Object › Align.

Object › Arrange moves the selection through the stack: Bring to Front (⇧⌘]), Bring Forward (⌘]), Send Backward (⌘[) and Send to Back (⇧⌘[).

Grouping, locking and hiding

Group (⌘G) and Ungroup (⇧⌘G) collect and release objects; double-clicking a group with the Selection tool steps inside it. Lock › Selection (⌘2) makes objects unpickable until Unlock All (⌥⌘2), and Hide › Selection (⌘3) takes them off the canvas until Show All (⌥⌘3).

Repeats, blends and envelopes

Object › Repeat makes a live repeat from the selection: Radial…, Grid… or Mirror…. The copies follow the original as you edit it. With a repeat selected, the Properties panel sets instances and radius for a radial repeat, columns, rows and spacing for a grid, and the offset and mirror axis for a mirror. Release turns the copies into ordinary artwork.

The Blend Tool (W) blends one object into another: click the first, then the second. Clicking a third carries the chain on, and clicking into an existing blend adds that object to it. Object › Blend holds Make (⌥⌘B), Release (⌥⇧⌘B), Blend Options… for the number of steps, the spacing and the orientation, Expand, and Replace Spine, Reverse Spine and Reverse Front to Back. A blend stays live and follows its key objects.

Object › Envelope Distort bends artwork into a shape. Make with Warp… (⌥⇧⌘W) uses one of the warp styles, Make with Top Object (⌥⌘C) uses the frontmost selected shape as the envelope for everything below it, and Make with Mesh… (⌥⌘M) lays a grid of the rows and columns you ask for over the selection. A mesh envelope stays live: switch to the Direct Selection Tool (A) and drag any crossing of the mesh to bend what it holds, as often as you like. Release gives the artwork back as it was along with the envelope shape, and Expand keeps the bend and drops the mesh.

Opening, placing and exporting

Everything in this section happens on your own computer. Scissor has no server: a file you open is read in the browser, and a file you export is written straight back to your disk. In the shortcuts below, ⌘ is Ctrl on Windows and Linux, and ⌥ is Alt.

The .cut document

Scissor's own format is .cut, versioned JSON holding the whole node tree. Use File > Save (⌘S), Save As… (⇧⌘S) or Save a Copy… (⌥⌘S). Where the browser supports it, Scissor keeps a handle on the file you picked, so later saves go back to the same place without a dialog; elsewhere each save arrives as a download. Close a document with ⌥⌘W.

Opening other formats

File > Open… (⌘O) takes several files at once. You can also drag files onto the canvas.

SVG

Shapes, paths, groups, nested svg, use and symbol, transforms, presentation attributes and inline styles, simple <style> rules, linear and radial gradients, clipping paths, basic text and images. Inkscape's own files are SVG, so they open here too: its layers arrive as layers keeping their names, and hidden and locked layers stay hidden and locked.

PDF, and PDF based .ai

One artboard per page. Paths, colours, line style, clipping, form XObjects, text with its font and position, and pictures including JPEG, indexed images and stencil masks with their soft-mask alpha. Axial and radial shadings come through whether painted directly or through a pattern fill.

Photoshop .psd

Layers become placed pictures inside their groups, keeping names, opacity, blend mode and hidden state. Layer masks are applied; vector masks and the paths from the Paths panel arrive as editable paths; type layers as editable text. The layer styles that draw — drop shadows, inner shadows and glows — come through as live effects.

Affinity's own documents are not read: the format is closed, with no published spec, and version 3 changed the extension. Affinity exports SVG and PDF, and Scissor reads both.

Why .ai is read but never written

A modern .ai file is a PDF, which is why one opens through the PDF importer. Writing .ai is another matter: the extension names Adobe's document, and a file claiming to be one while carrying Scissor's own structure would mislead whoever opened it next. Scissor writes .cut for its own work, and PDF or SVG when the artwork needs to travel.

Placing images

File > Place… (⇧⌘P) brings SVG, PNG, JPEG, GIF and WebP into the open document. Raster images are embedded as data URIs, so the document carries its pictures and never goes looking for a linked file. Placed SVG arrives as editable artwork rather than a picture. Dragging a file in does the same, except that .cut, PDF, .ai and .psd open as documents of their own. Pasting an image from the clipboard places it. To turn live artwork into pixels, use Object > Rasterize, which replaces the selection with a 2x image of itself.

Exporting

File > Export writes the active artboard as SVG, PNG (at 1x, 2x, or transparent), JPEG or WebP; Export As PDF… writes the whole document, one page per artboard. Export Selection… writes only the selected objects as SVG. PDF export is an in-house writer: vector paths, gradients, opacity, clipping, standard-14 text and placed pictures with their transparency, so the result stays editable elsewhere rather than being a picture of the artwork. JPEG has no alpha, so it always keeps a background.

Export for Screens… (⌥⌘E) handles several files in one pass. Tick the artboards and slices you want, tick any of PNG, JPEG, WebP and SVG, and type the scales as a list such as 1x, 2x, 3x; vector output ignores scale. Slices come from Object > Slice — Make, Create from Guides or Create from Selection — or from the Slice tool (⇧K). Where the browser allows it you pick a folder and the files are written into it; otherwise they arrive as separate downloads.

The Asset Export panel exports pieces of art rather than whole boards. Select artwork, press Add Selection, and rename each entry in the list; the name becomes the filename. Set the formats and scales once, then press Export to write every asset at every combination.

Printing

File > Print… (⌘P) sends the active artboard to the browser's own print dialog. The page is set landscape or portrait to match the artboard's proportions, with a 12 mm margin, and the artwork is fitted inside it. Set the artboard size first in File > Document Setup… (⌥⌘P).

Keyboard shortcuts

The shortcuts below are written in the macOS form. On Windows and Linux, read ⌘ as Ctrl and ⌥ as Alt; ⇧ is Shift on every platform. Scissor shows whichever form matches the machine you are working on, so the menus on a Windows computer read Ctrl+S where this page reads ⌘S.

Shortcuts are matched by the physical position of the key rather than by the character it produces, so an AZERTY or Dvorak layout uses the same keys as a QWERTY one. Most shortcuts do nothing until a document is open; a handful — creating and opening documents, Preferences, the appearance settings and the Help items — work with no document on screen.

Menu items that are listed in Scissor but not yet working are shown greyed out and are left out of this reference, along with the shortcuts printed beside them.

File

Edit

Cut, copy and paste are left to the browser rather than caught by Scissor, so that the system clipboard behaves as it does everywhere else. Choosing them from the Edit menu does the same thing as pressing the keys.

Object

Type

Select

Effect

The Effect menu carries no keyboard shortcuts. Reach its commands from the menu itself, or type the name of the effect into the search field at the top of the Help menu, which finds commands across every menu.

View

Window

Each of these brings its panel to the front, and ticks in the menu while the panel's group is on screen. Panels without a shortcut — Actions, 3D and Materials, Boards, Asset Export, Document Info, Navigator, Properties, Swatches and Variables — open from the Window menu.

Tools

Tool shortcuts are single keys pressed without a modifier, apart from those that take ⇧. They pick the tool straight away, including tools that sit inside a flyout behind another tool in the toolbar. Tools with no shortcut listed here — among them Group Selection, Area Type, Arc, Spiral, Polygon, Star, Smooth, Shear and Measure — are reached by holding the mouse on their toolbar slot and choosing from the flyout.

The Add Anchor Point and Delete Anchor Point shortcuts are the = and - keys on the main row of the keyboard, pressed on their own; the Curvature Tool is on the ~ key with ⇧ held.

Fill, stroke and panels

These keys are not on any menu. They act on the fill and stroke swatches at the foot of the toolbar, and on the panels around the canvas.

Whichever of the two swatches is active takes the next colour you choose. X moves the highlight between them, ⇧X exchanges the two colours, and / empties the active one.

Your work and your privacy

Scissor has no server behind it. The engine runs inside the browser tab, and so does everything it does: drawing, editing, importing SVG, PDF, .ai and PSD files, and exporting. Your artwork is never uploaded, because there is nowhere to upload it to.

Where your documents live

Documents are files on your own computer. Open and Save use the browser's own file picker, so you choose the folder and Scissor writes back to the file you picked. In browsers without that picker, saving and exporting arrive as ordinary downloads and opening goes through a file chooser. The native document format is .cut.

Recovery after a crash

While a document has unsaved changes, Scissor writes a copy into the browser's own storage on this machine every few seconds, and again whenever the tab is hidden or closed. If a session ends badly, the next time you open Scissor you are offered the leftover work with a Recover button. Saving a document clears its copy. In a private window, or where site storage is blocked, recovery is unavailable and nothing is written.

Analytics

On a first visit a bar at the foot of the window asks whether Scissor may use Google Analytics to count visits and see which features are used. Declining loads no analytics at all, and leaving the question unanswered counts as declining. Either way your artwork stays on your computer. To change your mind, choose Help > Privacy Settings…; turning analytics off reloads the page so the tracking code is gone.

Installing the app

Choose Help > Install Scissor… to install Scissor as an app. It then opens in its own window, works without a connection because the browser has kept a copy of the files, and can open .cut, SVG, PDF, .ai and PSD files directly from your desktop. There is no account and no sign-in.