Make Multi-Page Docs in Affinity Publisher

LAST MONTH WE CREATED a single-page document in Affinity Publisher, but Serif’s app is capable of so much more. The creation of entire magazines, catalogs, and books in a single document is not outside of its capabilities.

This time we’re looking at master pages, which enable you to replicate elements on every new page you create; text frame linking, which allows text to flow between pages; baseline grids, which enable you to lock your text in place and keep it lined up; as well as use of the Assets panel, which stores content you need frequently, but not regularly enough to place on a master page. There’s a lot of depth to Publisher—we’re not even touching on switching between Personas this month—and the app is well on its way to challenging InDesign and QuarkXPress at the top of the page layout (what used to be called desktop publishing) tree.

Once again, this is very much the way MaximumPC is produced, its ranks of highly paid graphic designers sweating under the lash of the art editor as they use Adobe InDesign on highpowered computers. –IAN EVENDEN 1

MASTER PAGES We touched on this last month, but if you’re creating a multipage document, you can save a great deal of time by setting up masters first, especially if you want your pages to be consistent. We set up a master page with a header and footer last month, but you can take this further by populating the master with all the empty frames you’ll need to create a page, and by having multiple masters to create different styles of page, such as those balanced for appearing on the left or right of the publication. So, create a new document or open an existing one, and click “View > Studio > Pages” to open the Pages palette if it’s not already open. By default, the master page at the top is a spread—two of the pages you specified when you created the document. This is fine if you want your spreads to all be the same, but if you want to mix it up, you can add single masters by clicking “Add Master” and choosing “Single.” You can set different margins and even different page dimensions on the master, but as we want a consistent look, we’ll keep them all the same [ Image A].

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POPULATE THE MASTER If you’ve got an idea for a layout that will appear more than once in your document, that’s a candidate for a master. On your newly created master page (probably called Master B), lay out your page as though it were a normal part of the document. Place frames for text and images, and place any logos or other graphics you know you’ll want on every page. Remember to line things up using a grid of guides and columns as we did last month. We’ve got two 16:9 image frames (create a frame, then use the Transform palette to resize it to 16 x 9mm; drag one of its corner handles to resize it, but hold Shift to lock the aspect ratio), with text boxes under them to hold captions. Then there are three columns of text laid out across a seven-column grid, allowing a bit of white space. We’re making two of these: one for a left-hand page, with the images on the left, and a mirror image version (Master C) for right-hand pages [ Image B].

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CREATE PAGES FROM MASTERS Now, we can quickly create pages. The opening page of our document will be custom, with a header and large image, but the text will flow on to three subsequent pages. Create the new pages using “Add Pages” in the Pages palette, and they appear as a spread and one single page after our existing opener. To apply the masters, drag the one you want from the Master Pages palette to their targets on the Pages palette—we dragged Master C to pages 2 and 4, and Master B to page 3. From here, you can flow the text across pages using the blue arrow on the right of a full text frame, and insert images into the image frames as you want [ Image C].

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BASELINE GRID If you run your eyes horizontally across your columns now they’re full of text (right-click one and select “Insert Filler Text” if you haven’t got any), you may notice the lines don’t line up. This is often fine in the world of newspapers, but considered messy in magazines, and can be fixed with a baseline grid—a series of horizontal lines your text can snap to. Open the Baseline Grid Manager using “View > Show Baseline Grid Manager” or using the button at the top of the interface that looks like a bunch of lines, and check the “Use Baseline Grid” box. The “Start Position” is an offset that moves the entire grid, so you can start it at the top of your columns. Before setting this, check the “Show Baseline Grids” box so you can see what you’re doing. Now alter the “Start Position” so a grid line intersects perfectly with the top of one of your text columns. We generally set “Relative To” to “Top of Spread,” and “Grid Spacing” to whatever the “Leading” setting is for your body text. (Leading is the gap between lines, so called because early printers used lead to separate lines; it’s usually a little larger than your point size, so we’re using 9pt text on 11pt leading.) In our experience using Quark, InDesign, and Publisher, locking to a baseline grid always messes something up, whether it’s because you’ve got a drop cap (the large capital letter at the beginning of an article) or a crosshead (the larger lines used to separate sections of text) that’s a different size to your body text. Generally, though, it’s useful for making layouts neat, even if it does lead to lots of fiddling [ Image D].

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ASSETS PANEL Similar to the Master Pages palette, in that it stores content for you to reuse, the Assets panel enables you to store a copy of a frame to reuse later. Whether it’s a text frame with just the right number of formatted characters in it, or an image frame of the correct aspect ratio, it can save time because you don’t need to recreate the asset from scratch. Open the Assets panel, which is in a tab next to Pages, and create a new Category by dropping down the panel’s menu. Rename it if you want. Then, select the frames you want from your document, open the drop-down menu for the Category you created, and select “Add From Selection.” Your frames appear in the Assets panel, and can be dragged back on to the document as many times as you need. Note that if your frames are from a master page, you need to go to the master page itself to add them to the Assets panel [ Image E].