Getting pictures into Publish by Zaweba

Pictures do most of the talking on a flyer or a newsletter. People look at the photo first and read the words second, so getting pictures onto the page quickly, and sitting nicely in their frames, is half the job. Publish by Zaweba gives you three ways in and three ways to fit a picture to its frame.

You can insert a picture, paste one, or drag and drop it onto the page. Pasting creates a frame for it. Inside the frame, a picture can fill, fit or stretch.

Three ways in

Inserting is the deliberate route. You choose a picture file and it comes onto the page in a frame. It suits the moment when you know which photo you want and where it lives on your disk.

Pasting is the quick route. Copy a picture from another program, such as a photo editor or a web page you have permission to use, and paste it into Publish. A frame is created for it automatically, so you do not need to draw one first.

Dragging and dropping suits sorting through a folder. Open the folder beside Publish, drag the picture you want onto the page, and drop it where it should go. When you are building a newsletter from a folder of club photos, this is often the fastest way to try a few options.

Fill, fit or stretch

A picture rarely has exactly the same shape as the frame you want it in. The fitting options decide what happens.

Fill makes the picture cover the whole frame, keeping its proportions, and trims whatever sticks out. This is the usual choice for photos in a layout, because it leaves no empty bands and nothing is squashed. If the important part of the photo ends up cut off, you can crop inside the frame to move the picture around until it sits right.

Fit shows the whole picture inside the frame, keeping its proportions, and leaves space on two sides if the shapes differ. It suits logos, diagrams and anything where every part must be visible.

Stretch makes the picture match the frame exactly by changing its proportions. It is rarely what you want for photos, because faces and buildings look squashed or pulled. It can be useful for plain textures or patterns, where distortion does not show.

Pictures and the words around them

New pictures come in with square text wrap, so text in boxes nearby steps around them rather than running underneath. That is usually exactly right on a newsletter page. If you place a picture as a background behind text, you can turn the wrap off.

Once a picture is placed, it can be cropped inside its frame, given a border, recoloured, brightened or set into an ellipse or rounded rectangle. Those adjustments are applied to the picture in the publication; the stored picture itself is never changed.

Getting good results

Use pictures that are big enough. A small image from a message or a web page might look fine on screen and soft or blocky in print, especially if it fills half an A4 page. The print-ready PDF export keeps pictures at full resolution, which is what you want for print, so the quality of the original is what you get.

Use pictures you have the right to use. Photos you took yourself, ones a member gave you for the newsletter and pictures you have a licence for are all fine. Images copied from search results usually are not.

Keep the number of photos sensible. A page with one strong picture usually looks better than a page with six small ones, and the file stays a manageable size, since pictures are kept inside the .ozp.

Getting a picture into Publish by Zaweba takes a second; choosing the right one and fitting it well is where the real design happens.