Page layouts and templates

A page layout is the arrangement every page of your book shares: where the artwork sits, whether it has a border, where the caption or the story text goes, and whether pages carry numbers.

Picking one

The gallery offers layouts appropriate to your preset. A coloring book is not shown a habit tracker, and a planner is not shown a medallion frame.

Choose one and it becomes the book's template: every design page is stamped with it.

Changing your mind is safe

Applying a different layout keeps what matters:

• Artwork moves into the new layout's frame — it is not lost and it is not re-charged.
• Text you actually wrote is carried across.
• Layers you added yourself are never touched.

What gets replaced is the furniture the previous layout put there. Placeholder text still showing a {token} is treated as the old template's seed, and the new template supplies its own.

Designing your own

The template is a real page you design, on the same canvas as any other, from scratch or starting from a built-in.

Open it from the page plan's gallery or the editor's Templates section.

Placeholders

Ordinary layers that carry a role:

Because they are ordinary layers, the inspector already edits their font, size, colour and alignment. The role is what lets content survive a template change.

Borders are one layer

A double or triple frame is one border layer, not several rectangles you have to keep concentric by hand. Set the number of rules, their weight, the gap between them, style and corner radius.

Artwork is fitted inside the innermost rule automatically, so the picture does not print underneath the frame — which on a coloring page, where both are black, looks exactly like a mistake in the drawing.

Tokens

Text placeholders can carry tokens that resolve per page:

{page} · {pages} · {design} · {designs} · {title} · {author} · {section}

{page} and {design} are different numbers. In a book with a blank back to every design, the fourth design is printed sheet nine.

An unknown token is left alone so a typo is visible rather than silently blank.

Mirroring

A template is designed on a right-hand page and mirrors onto left-hand pages by default.

This is not cosmetic. The gutter is on the left of a recto and the right of a verso, so a layout copied verbatim puts its margin — and any page number in the outside corner — into the binding on every other page.

Turn mirroring off only for a deliberately asymmetric design.

The pages follow the template

Editing the template restamps the book automatically. There is no "apply to all" step to forget, and no second answer to "what does a page of this book look like".

It is safe because restamping is non-destructive: artwork, your words and your own layers all survive.

What to watch for

• The template is not a printed page. It does not appear in the page list, is not counted, and never prints.
• Applying a layout appends furniture; it does not wipe the page. Your own layers stay where they are.
• Built-in layouts rebuild per page against that page's own geometry, so writing lines follow the gutter correctly on both sides. A hand-drawn template is projected as drawn — which is why mirroring exists.