Templates and layers

Templates

Eight genre-styled layouts — classic, literary, noir, romance, epic, bold, memoir and minimal — each built from your title, subtitle and author, and previewed live in the gallery.

One is suggested from your genre, but you can apply any of them.

Applying a template:

• is a single undo step,
• keeps your paper stock, so the spine width does not change under you,
• sizes the title by its length, so a one-word title and a sixty-character one both sit properly,
• keeps back-cover blurbs clear of the barcode zone.

A template is a starting point. Everything it creates is an ordinary layer you can move, restyle or delete.

Layers

Four kinds: text, rectangle, ellipse and image. A thin rectangle doubles as a rule.

Text

Font, size, colour, weight, alignment, letter case (including small caps), tracking, line height, and an outline.

Ten typefaces are available, and every one of them is embedded in the exported PDF and JPEG — so what you see is what prints, with no substitution.

Shapes

Solid fills, gradients with an angle, strokes, and corner radii.

Images

Upload your own, or generate one. Each image carries a fit mode so it can fill or letterbox its box.

Image dimensions are recorded on insert. That is what lets the release board check resolution against your trim — an image whose size was never captured reports "couldn't measure" rather than passing.

Effects on any layer

• Rotation, in degrees, with 0° and ±90° shortcuts.
• Shadow — soft or hard. Offsets are specified in inches, so the shadow's physical size is the same on the canvas, in the PDF and in the JPEG.
• Opacity, including alpha on any colour.

The canvas: background, texture and spine

With nothing selected, the Design stage offers the whole-wrap settings.

Background — a colour or a gradient with an angle, painted across the entire wrap.

Texture — an optional paper grain or linen weave, painted above the layers. It is sized to a real physical inch, so it looks the same on a 5×8 and a 7×10 rather than scaling with the page.

Paper — the stock. This is the same setting as the format controls, and it changes your spine width, so it is worth setting before you design across the spine.

Spine — see The spine.

What to watch for

• Templates author in absolute positions and are anchored on the way in. You never see this, but it is why a template applied to a 300-page book and the same one applied to a 90-page book both land correctly.
• Layer text does not auto-follow the book's title. Renaming the book leaves the cover as it was; re-apply a template if you want it refreshed.
• Texture paints above everything, including images. If it is fighting your artwork, turn it off rather than trying to compensate with opacity.