Flowing a newsletter story across pages with linked frames

Anyone who has put together a club or school newsletter knows the moment. You have a lovely front page laid out, with a headline, a photo and the start of the main story, and then the story is too long. In a word processor, everything after it shuffles down and the layout falls apart. In a layout app, you want the rest of the story to carry on somewhere else, on page two perhaps, without breaking what you have built.

That is what linked text frames are for, and in Publish by Zaweba they are at the heart of how a newsletter comes together. Text flows from box to box, even onto another page. When a story has more to say than its boxes can hold, a red plus shows on the last one.

How frames and stories work

In Publish, text lives in frames: boxes you draw on the page and can move, resize and arrange around pictures. A frame on its own holds a piece of text. Link two frames together and they become one story. Fill the first and the text carries on into the second, wherever it is.

The red plus is the bit I find most useful. It is a small, clear sign that a story is overflowing. If you see it, some of your text is hidden, and you need another frame, a smaller font or a bit of editing. No more printing fifty copies and finding the last paragraph was missing.

Building a newsletter, step by step

I usually start from the 2-page or 4-page newsletter template, which gives the basic layout. For a fresh one, set up the pages first, with master pages carrying the newsletter name and page numbers so every page has them.

Then lay out the front page. A headline frame, a picture, and a frame for the start of the lead story, perhaps sitting beside the picture with the text wrapping round it. Paste in the whole story. It will almost certainly overflow, and the red plus will tell you so.

Now go to page two, draw a frame where the story should continue, and link the overflowing frame to it. The rest of the text flows in. If it still overflows, link another. A story can run across several frames in columns and across pages until it is all on show.

Editing after linking

The nice thing about linked frames is that the story stays one piece of text. If someone asks you to add a paragraph near the start, add it, and everything after flows on through the chain. Make a frame smaller, and the text moves on to the next. You never have to cut and paste the end of a story from one box into another.

Tips from a few issues in

Write the copy before you lay it out if you can. It is much easier to fit a finished story into frames than to keep changing both at once. Publish doesn't have a spell checker, so it is worth writing in Write by Zaweba first and pasting in when it is final.

Leave a little room. A story that only just fits will overflow the moment someone asks for one more sentence. A small gap at the end of each story is easier to manage than a frantic edit the night before printing.

Keep an eye out for the red plus before exporting. A quick look through each page catches overflowing frames while they are still easy to fix.

Ready to print

When the newsletter is done, export a print-ready PDF with bleed and crop marks for a print shop, a lighter web PDF for emailing to members, or print it yourself. Publish measures text from the font files themselves, so the text in your linked frames breaks in the PDF exactly as it did on screen.

Publish by Zaweba is free software for Windows 10 and 11, offline and with no account. If your newsletter has always fought you in a word processor, linked frames will feel like a weight off.