The page designer

The page designer is where a layout book is actually made. It is a layer editor on the real printed page, with the trim, bleed and safe area drawn where they genuinely are.

Moving around

• Space-drag to pan, Ctrl+scroll to zoom at the pointer.
• The filmstrip on the left lists every page; click to open one.
• The storyboard shows every spread at once and lets you drag pages into a new order. For a picture book this is the view the book is really authored in — composing a spread one page at a time is what produces art that misses the fold.
• A picture book opens on its spread. On a phone it opens on the page instead — a spread at phone width is too small to work on — and Spread is one tap away.
• Page details, beside the filmstrip, holds the page's name, artwork direction and words, so there is no need to go back to the page plan for them.

Turning things

• Drag the round handle above a selection to turn it. It catches on the straight angles (0°, 45°, 90°); hold Shift to turn in 15° steps, or Alt to turn freely. The angle shows beside the pointer as you turn.
• Select several things and they turn together, around their shared middle.
• The keyboard turns a selection too: , and . by 1°, with Shift by 15°.
• A turned box still resizes from its handles, and the checks measure the space it really covers — a tilted badge whose corner reaches the trim is flagged like any other.

Layers

Insert text, images, shapes and patterned fills.

• Shift-click or marquee to select several.
• Duplicate, Lock and Delete sit right under the name of whatever is selected — on a phone, at the top of Adjust.
• Group them, align and distribute, change stacking order.
• Copy and paste, including paste-in-place.
• Undo and redo everything, including a template applied across forty pages — that is one undo step, not forty.

Changing one page of a template book

Most of what is on a page — a frame, a footer, a puzzle grid — comes from the page's template, and a change to the template redraws every page that follows it. You can still change one page on its own:

• Move, restyle or delete something from the template on one page, and that page keeps the change. Selecting it says Changed on this page, with Use the template's version to undo just that.
• Things you delete from one page stay deleted. The layer list says how many, with Put them back.
• A copy of something from the template is the page's own, and stays.
• To change every page, edit the template: selecting anything from it on a page offers Change every page.

Resize handles appear for a single selection only. Scaling a group would mean scaling type, and a "resize" that silently left the text at its old size would be worse than not offering one.

Text

Text layers can be plain or boxed — with a fill, a stroke, padding, a corner radius and vertical alignment — which is how you set a caption plate over full-bleed art.

Some words in a different style. Select words in the text box on the right, then B, I or U makes them bold, italic or underlined, the colour swatch gives them their own colour, and Plain returns them to the box's style. Keep typing and each word keeps its formatting. Font, size and the rest belong to the whole box. A box that prints something set for it — a page number, the page's name — takes no formatting of its own.

Fonts. The font list holds over 1,600 families: search it by name, or narrow it to serif, sans, display, handwriting or monospace with the chips at the top.

Text styles (a document-wide palette) let you change every caption in the book at once. Applying a style strips the properties the style owns, so the layer keeps only what genuinely differs from it.

Deleting a style bakes its values into the layers first, so tidying your style list never changes how the book looks.

Text that does not fit

A fixed page has nowhere to reflow to, so text that overruns its box is clipped — and clipped text is missing text.

Two tools, and both measure and then write:

• Fit text stores a real, smaller size.
• Continue on the next page splits the words into two ordinary boxes.

Neither makes the renderer shrink or reflow at draw time, because that would be a second layout engine deciding something the canvas did not show you.

The canvas marks an overflowing box, and the export measures it again and reports it as a blocker.

Shapes

Shape opens a gallery of twenty-two: rectangles, ovals, pills and arches; triangles, hexagons, slants and chevrons; stars, bursts, scallops, flowers, shields and tickets; blobs, clouds, hearts and speech bubbles. Pick one to put it on the page, filled with colour.

The gallery's Ornaments are the finishing pieces a page is dressed with: dividers to set under a heading (a diamond rule, three dots, a tapered rule, a wave, scrolls), corner pieces, a label and a ribbon banner for a title, and small motifs — a leaf, a moon, a sun, a sparkle, an arrow, a tick, a paw print and a music note. Each takes the shape's fill colour or gradient, turns and resizes like any shape, and prints as sharp lines at any size. Turn a corner piece to fit the other corners of the page. An ornament is clicked anywhere in its box, and has no torn edge.

The same gallery is in the Shape section when a shape or a picture is selected, so a photo can become a circle, an arch or a star. Most shapes have one or two settings — a star's points, an arch's rise, where a speech bubble's tail sits.

Edge gives any shape a deckled edge, like handmade paper, or a torn one, like a magazine cutout. Tear it again gives a different tear, and a tear stays the same every time the page is printed.

The outline is what you click: the empty corner around a star reaches whatever is behind it (an ornament is the exception — its whole box answers). A stroke follows the outline, inside it, whatever the shape.

Lines and tables

The shape gallery's Lines are a plain line, an arrow and a double arrow — stretch them to any length and turn them to any angle; an arrow keeps its head the same shape however long it grows, and Line weight sets its thickness.

Table puts a grid on the page with a tinted header row and a label over each column. Its Rows and Columns are set in the Table section, with the line weight and colours, and they stay evenly spaced however you resize it. The column labels are ordinary text boxes — edit, move or delete them like any text.

My library

My library keeps the pieces you want in more than one book.

• Save selection keeps the selected elements — a title plate, a set of corner ornaments — as one component. Place puts a copy in the middle of the page you are on, grouped so it moves as one.
• Standing on a template, Save this template keeps the whole layout. New template from it adds it to another book as one of that book's templates, scaled to its trim.

What you place is a copy: it belongs to the page, so changing or removing the saved one later changes no book.

Measurements

Positions, sizes, corner radius, inset and gaps are in inches — the unit KDP and most US printers specify everything in. Prefer millimetres? Switch Settings → Appearance → Measurements; the pages themselves do not change.

Line weights (a border, a stroke, a frame's rules) and type are always in points, as in every print tool: 0.5 pt is a hairline, 1 pt a normal rule.

You can type any unit into a measurement and it is converted: 3mm, 9pt, 1/8 or 1 1/4in. The arrow keys move to the next 1/32 inch (or half millimetre) mark, so they land on 1/16, 1/8 and 1/4; hold Shift for bigger steps.

The art library

Every illustration ever rendered stays in your art library, including versions you replaced.

Add a picture (the Image tool, or Pictures in the rail) opens your library, and puts one back on a page in one click — so deleting an art layer does not lose the picture, and does not mean paying to render it again. This book shows this book's art by page; All my art brings in a picture from any other book, and it arrives with its own AI-or-upload origin and pixel size, which the release board checks.

Hold a picture to see where it is used across all your books. A picture in use anywhere cannot be deleted.

Checks

The Checks panel is the release board's preflight, scoped to the page in front of you:

• artwork off the trim, or outside the safe area
• image resolution too low for print
• colour in a black-ink book
• greys below the minimum printable fill
• type under the legibility floor — including a picture book's own, higher floor
• words in the gutter — art may cross the fold, type may not

Three outcomes, not two: pass, fail, and unknown. An image whose dimensions were never recorded reports "couldn't measure" and never a pass.

What to watch for

• Every drag commits. If you drag something and navigate away, the change is saved — there is no separate confirm step.
• Resizing a full-bleed image makes it no longer full-bleed. That is the honest reading of the gesture; if you want it back, re-apply the full-bleed artwork placeholder.
• The safe rect mirrors between left and right pages. A block built once and copied across lands wrongly on alternate pages; build per page, or let the template mirror for you.