The Upper Toolbar

The leftmost buttons exit the Designer, either saving your layout or discarding any changes. You can use Ctrl+E to exit (and save) or Ctrl+Q to quit. The centre two buttons walk the Property Watcher around the objects (in the order you defined them) and are operated by PgUp/PgDn so that you can move easily between objects without using the mouse. If you try this, you will see that the selected object is always shown with bright cyan handles in the page window.

The ? button makes a ‘Cue Card’ for the selected object and is activated with the F1 key. Finally, you can press the last button or hit F5 to ‘zoom in’ on your design for an exact facsimile of the design, with all the master-page elements in place, and any frames filled with generated text.

The Lower Toolbar

The easy way to see what these tools do is to pull the ‘body’ frame into a corner of the paper and then press them one by one, starting at the left. The leftmost tool will mirror the frame, i.e. will leave the left edge where it is and make the right margin the same. The second is very similar, but leaves the size fixed and moves the frame to be centred on the paper; the third centres vertically in the same way. All these tools have hot keys – hold the mouse over the tool for a pop-up tip.

You can duplicate objects (the copy will be offset slightly) with the fourth button (or the + key on the numeric pad). Hitting Ctrl+Del or the rightmost button will delete all selected objects. That leaves the two alignment tools, which will only function when more than one object is selected – what you might like to do is to make your frame quite small, duplicate it several times, move the copies around the screen, then select them in groups (using the mouse to drag a rectangle around them) and experiment.

Selecting and aligning objects
When you drag a rectangle around several objects, all those you select will have solid-coloured handles, but only one is bright cyan – this is the ‘master’ object of the set and is the one to which the others will be aligned. If you want to align to a specific object, click this one first, then use Ctrl+Click to select the others one at a time.

The way the align tools work depends on how the master object is attached. If you press ‘align to sides’ and the master object is attached to the right-hand side of the paper, any other objects will move so that their right edges align with its right edge. They will also be given the same attachment. The same applies if you have attached the master object to width or height – in this case any other objects will be stretched to the same size and attached similarly.