Book design

Formats #

A format is your book's design in one bundle — page size, margins, typography, chapter openings, headers and footers. Project settings holds it, and six are built in: Charc Default (8.5×11), Trade Paperback (6×9), Digest (5.5×8.5), Mass Market (4.25×6.87), Large Print (6×9) and Screenplay (US Letter).

Change anything and Apply saves it to this project alone. Save as new format turns it into one you can reuse across books, and formats export and import as files, so a design can move between projects or people.

Page size and margins #

Choose a trim size or set width and height yourself. Margins are top, bottom, left and right — unless facing pages is on (a document setting — see below), in which case they become inner and outer, and swap sides on alternate pages the way a bound book does.

Bleed is the extra artwork beyond the trim line that printers ask for. It defaults to the print-on-demand standard and is harmless for digital output.

Body typography #

Typeface, size in points, line height and paragraph spacing for the body text of the finished book.

This is separate from the font you draft in. The editor's font is a preference of yours; this one is a property of the book, which is why you can write in something comfortable and export in something correct.

What decides the type size #

Three things can set the size of a piece of text, and they apply in this order.

1. The book's format. Body size and line height in Project settings are the baseline for the whole manuscript, and what the page view and the PDF use.

2. Inline sizes. The size control in the editor toolbar sets a size on the selected text and stores it with the words. It beats the format wherever it is used — deliberately, for a display line or a piece of found text. It also arrives uninvited: text pasted from a browser or Word usually carries sizes and typefaces you never chose, which is the usual reason a format seems not to apply. Reset text to this format, beside the body size setting, clears inline sizes and faces across the manuscript while keeping bold, italics, colour and alignment.

3. The export style. A style can override both. Manuscript styles normalize: 12pt, double-spaced, half-inch indent, inline sizes ignored, because submissions are meant to look identical. Book styles use the document, keeping the format's size and your inline sizes. The compile panel says which one is about to apply before you export.

So the same manuscript can produce a conforming submission and a designed paperback without editing a word, and if a size ever looks wrong the question is which of the three set it.

Chapter openings #

Every chapter follows one set of rules rather than being laid out by hand. Whether the number shows, its style — Chapter One, Chapter 1, or just the numeral — whether the title and subtitle appear, how they align, and how far down the page the text begins.

Part title pages for acts work the same way, and can be turned off entirely.

Headers, footers and page numbers #

Running heads take a left, center and right slot each, filled with your own text or tokens like the book title and page number. They can mirror on facing pages, and the first page of a chapter can be left bare, as most printed books do.

Scene dividers #

The mark between scenes inside a chapter — * * * by default, or anything you type, or nothing. There is also an option to start each scene on its own page, which suits some non-fiction and most screenplays.

Formats and presets are different things #

A format is the book's design and lives with the project. A preset is an export configuration — what to include, the style, the file type, the processing — and lives in the Compile window.

You can export the same book to a submission manuscript and a trade paperback without touching its format, because the export style overrides it for that file only.

Document settings and your view are different things #

Several settings come in pairs with almost the same name: one is a property of the book, the other of your screen. The rule: if it changes the printed book it lives in Project settings and travels with the project, so collaborators and exports get it too. If it changes only what you see while writing, it lives in Preferences and stays on your device.

The pair that catches people is facing pages. In Project settings it makes the book double-sided: margins become inner and outer rather than left and right, so the gutter alternates and the running heads can mirror. That is what the PDF and the printer get. In Preferences, Facing pages (page view) only sets two pages side by side on screen while you write — it changes nothing about the book. Turning on the view and exporting will still give you single-sided margins; turning on the document setting affects the export whether or not you ever look at a spread.

Bleed works the same way. The amount is a document setting and goes to the printer; Show bleed on the front matter canvas just draws the trim line and dims the bleed zone so you can see where the cut falls.

So does type size. The manuscript's typeface and point size are part of the book's format and print. The manuscript zoom beside the view toggle, and UI text size in Preferences, only scale what is on your screen.

Pageless and Page view are views, not properties. Every page-layout setting applies to the exported book no matter which one you are looking at; page view simply shows you the result as you write.

Chapters on a right-hand page #

Printed books conventionally open each chapter on a recto — the right-hand page — and insert a blank left-hand page when the previous chapter happens to end on the right. Chapters start on a right-hand page in Project settings does this for you.

It depends on facing pages being on, because without a double-sided book there are no left and right pages to speak of. It also has no meaning on screen in pageless view or in EPUB, where the reader's device decides where pages fall — it is a print convention, and it matters most on chapters that open with artwork.

Wrapping text around things #

Anything you place on a page with a body-text frame can carve the text flowing past it. In the inspector's Text Wrap section, choose Rectangle, Circle, Ellipse or a shape you draw yourself. None leaves the text alone, which is what you want for something sitting in a margin.

Wrap gap is the clear space between the shape's edge and the nearest word. A few points is usually enough; too much and the hole in the text starts to read as a mistake.

An image clips itself to its wrap contour, so what you see is exactly what the text respects — there is no invisible rectangle behind a circular picture pushing words further away than they look. On a frame with several columns, a shape carves only the columns it actually overlaps.

Drawing your own wrap shape #

Choose Custom shape and Edit shape… opens a pen-style editor over the image. Drag any anchor to move it. Click a midpoint between two anchors to add one. Double-click an anchor to switch it between a corner and a smooth point, and the curve tension slider bends the smooth ones into flowing contours.

The same window pans and zooms the picture behind the shape, so you can frame the subject and cut the contour around it in one pass rather than guessing at one and then fixing the other.

The shape is also a crop #

A wrap shape does two jobs at once: it decides how text flows past the element, and it crops the picture inside it. That is deliberate — a circular portrait that text curves around should be a circle in both senses, and keeping them as one thing means they cannot drift apart.

Shape size sets how much of the element box the shape fills, and Shape X and Shape Y move it within that box. Image zoom, Image X and Image Y then frame the picture inside the shape — the difference between a circle that happens to land on a shoulder and one centred on a face.

Whatever you set, the poured text respects the same edge you are looking at.

Free placement and the anchor grid #

New elements start free: drag them anywhere on the page and they stay where you put them. That is how most designed pages get made, so it is the default.

The inspector's Anchored switch is the other model. An anchored element sits in the page's nine-point grid — top-left through bottom-right — and stacks with its neighbours instead of holding a position. It is the right choice when you want a title block that stays centred no matter what else changes, and the wrong one when you are composing by eye.

Rulers, guides and snapping #

The Design canvas has a ruler along the top and left edge showing the page at its true size — inches, not screen pixels. Drag from either ruler to pull out a guide, and drag a guide back off the page to delete it. Double-click or right-click one removes it too.

Snap objects in the toolbar makes a dragged element jump to a nearby guide, and to the margin lines when Margins is on. Hold Ctrl (⌘ on a Mac) while dragging to suspend snapping for one move. The snap increment lives in Preferences, and the ruler's fine ticks follow it.

Right-click an element for its own menu — wrap, rotate, arrange, duplicate, delete — or right-click the page itself to add an element or clear the guides. The page cards in the sidebar show a real thumbnail of each page, so finding the right one does not mean opening all of them.

Screenplay layout #

A screenplay project uses element formatting rather than paragraph styling: scene headings, action, character cues, dialogue, parentheticals and transitions, with Enter and Tab moving between them.

The Screenplay format applies industry metrics — Courier 12, the standard indents, one page to roughly one minute — and the export adds (MORE) and (CONT'D) across page breaks and a proper title page.