I’m working on my first animation, but when I opened it today, the onion skin wouldn’t work. Here, take a look:
The previous frame/key is the same, except with some words. I want to be able to see the words using onion skin. why is it not working?
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@Ramen Hi. First of all welcome to the forum.
The “onion skin” button on the timeline, is a misnomer. It’s actually used to switch the “match keyframe” mode with lets you see onion skinned adjacent frames or drawings (keyframes)
Regarding the issue itself it seems you’ve run into a bug that has been reported already and fortunately developers are aware of it.
The problem lies that the onion skin happens on a canvas level, so if you have a background layer covering the transparent canvas, you won’t be able to see the onion skin.
The workaround for now is to turn off any layer that might cover the canvas completely (in your case the "background layer) and animate your characters without it until it’s time to render the final video (then you turn it on). In the future we hope to have a per-layer onion skin that won’t require such workaround.
@Ramen Also since this is probably your first work with P2D, please take a look at this guide to prevent losing work from an issue that has been happening to users randomly but consistently and has to do with the saving and loading within the program itself:
Sometimes the onion skin does not work so you need to restart you computer that’s what I did when my onion skin did not work and it work after I reset my pc 
@Ramen
don’t worry if the onion skin still does not work pencil 2d Update’s all the time so in an update soon it will probably be fixed