Designed pages
Pages you draw rather than type — and pages your manuscript flows straight through, repeating for a whole chapter or dropped in at a single moment.
A page you draw, not a page you type #
Most of your book is prose in a column. A designed page is the other kind: a page you compose by placing things on it — art, a title, a quote, an ornament, a rule — the way you would lay out a title page or a chapter opening. They live in the Design tab.
Every piece on the page is an element, and elements are the same handful everywhere: text, image, shape, divider, ornament, spacer, border, chart, and the body-text frame below. You place them by dragging, size them by their handles, and style them in the inspector on the right.
A designed page is a real page of the book, at your book's real trim size and margins. What you see on the canvas is what prints — which is why the page view and the PDF agree with it rather than approximating it.
Four ways to place one #
A designed page does nothing until you tell the book where it goes. There are four routes, and which one you want depends on how often the page should appear.
Bound to a chapter — from the outline, give a chapter a designed page and it becomes that chapter's opening, repeating as needed for the whole chapter. Before or after a scene — also from the outline, for a plate that belongs at one particular seam. At the cursor — the toolbar button drops one where you are typing. At a page break — in page view, hover the top of any page and a pill offers to drop a designed page at that break.
Placements float forward to the next natural page boundary. That matters more than it sounds: it means the page before a designed page is never left half-empty to make room, which is what would happen if the break landed exactly where you clicked.
Body-text frames: pages your manuscript flows through #
Add a Body text frame to a designed page and your manuscript pours through it. The page stops being decoration and becomes part of the reading flow — an illustrated chapter opening whose first page is designed and whose text is your actual prose, still editable right there on the page.
A page can hold several frames. They fill in the order you number them, so a narrow column beside an image can hand over to a full-width block underneath it. Each frame can carry its own columns, with its own gap.
When the text outruns the frames, it continues into the next copy of the page if the template repeats, and then back into ordinary pages. Nothing is lost and nothing has to be cut to fit.
Template pages: repeating a design for a whole chapter #
Binding a designed page to a chapter makes it a template page: the page repeats for as long as the chapter needs it. A chapter with a recurring margin column or a two-frame editorial layout keeps that layout page after page, without you placing anything a second time.
You still write into it normally. The prose in a frame is the same manuscript text you would edit in pageless view — the same words, in a different shaped container.
Six layouts to start from #
New designed pages can start from a layout rather than a blank canvas: Full Page, Margin Quote, Illustrated Opening, Split Art & Text, Two Frames and Editorial.
Each one arrives as ordinary elements. There is nothing locked or special about a layout once it lands — move the frame, restyle the quote, delete the ornament. It is a starting point, not a container.
Taking one back out #
A placed designed page carries a small label in the manuscript with a remove button. Removing it takes the page out of the flow and returns the text to ordinary pages; nothing you wrote is affected.
If you delete the designed page itself from the Design tab, any placement of it goes too, and the confirmation tells you how many places that is before you commit. A placement whose page has vanished some other way — an older draft, or a co-author deleting it on their side — shows as a broken marker you can click to clear.
What happens in EPUB and Word #
Body templates are a print idea. A frame exists to shape a column on a fixed page, and neither EPUB nor Word has a fixed page — an e-reader reflows to whatever screen and type size the reader chose. So in those formats the text simply flows, and the frame is not reproduced.
Designed pages that are mostly text — a title page, a dedication, an epigraph — do travel: they come through as real, styled, searchable paragraphs. Pages that are mostly picture come through as pictures. See What travels to each format.
If a book needs both a designed print edition and an ebook, the practical answer today is two projects — one laid out for print, one written for reflow.