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

Three kinds: text, shapes and images. A thin rectangle doubles as a rule (Line adds one).

Text

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

Fit to text (under the size) makes a text box exactly the size of its words, so its handles and alignment guides sit on the text rather than on a larger box. The words stay where they are, and one undo puts the box back. A line that wraps keeps its width, so no line breaks change. The same button is in the page designer.

More than 1,600 typefaces are available — the full Google Fonts library. Search the font menu by name, or narrow it to serif, sans, display, script or mono; every row is shown in its own typeface. Whichever you choose is embedded in the exported PDF and JPEG, so what you see is what prints.

Shapes

Shape opens a gallery of twenty-two — rectangles, ovals, arches, stars, bursts, badges, blobs, clouds, hearts, speech bubbles and more — with solid fills, gradients with an angle, and a stroke that follows the outline.

Any shape can have a deckled or torn edge, the cut-paper look of a magazine collage. And an image can take any shape too: select it and choose one under Shape.

Images

Upload your own, generate one, or pick any picture from your art library with Image (or Add a picture) — a page from the book, or art from another 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.