Personal computing devices (e.g. cell phones, PDAs, laptops, gaming devices) provide users with increasing functionality and data storage. Personal computing devices serve as personal organizers, storage for documents, photographs, videos, and music, as well as portals to the Internet and electronic mail. In order to fit within the small displays of such devices, large documents (e.g., photographs, music files and contact lists) are typically displayed in a viewer that can present a portion of the document in a size large enough to be read and be controlled by scrolling or panning functions to reveal other portions. In order to view all or parts of a document image or sort through a list of digital files, typical graphical user interfaces permit users to use scroll or panning functions by making unidirectional movements of one finger on a touchscreen display, as implemented on mobile devices such as the Blackberry Storm®. However, because of the small size of the viewer in portable computing devices, the entire contents of document images do not generally fit in the display. Since only a portion of a large document is generally displayed in the viewer of a computing device, users may lose their position and orientation with respect to the entire document. As such, users may be unable to appreciate the boundaries of a document image based on the portion of a document image that is displayed on the viewer.