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.

Layers

Insert text, images, rectangles, ellipses and patterned fills.

• Shift-click or marquee to select several.
• 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.

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.

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.

The art library

Every illustration ever rendered for a book stays in its storage, including versions you replaced.

The Artwork library panel lists them and puts one back on a page in one click. Deleting an art layer therefore does not lose the picture, and does not mean paying to render it again.

An image still in use cannot be deleted from the library.

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.