A document authoring program provides different views of a document opened by a user. In the editing view, the user can view the document contents and edit the contents in using a menu bar. In the semantic zoom view, the user is presented with a heading pane and a thumbnail pane and the menu bar is removed. The user can toggle from the editing view to the semantic zoom view by zooming out past a defined threshold using various user interface controls. Once the threshold is exceeded, the semantic view is presented. The editing view is returned to by selecting a heading or a thumbnail page, which respectively returns the user the page incorporating the selected heading or to the page incorporating the selected heading. This page will be displayed in the editing view at the same zoom level prior to toggling to the semantic zoom view.