Moving, resizing and rotating frames in Publish by Zaweba

Most of the real work on a flyer happens after the words and pictures are in. A headline sits a little too low, a photo crowds the margin, or a starburst of a shape wants tipping at a jaunty angle. In Publish by Zaweba every one of those fixes comes down to the same three moves: drag the frame, drag a handle to change its size, or drag the rotation handle to turn it.

These are the moves you'll make hundreds of times on every publication, so it pays to get comfortable with them early. They work the same way on text boxes, picture frames and shapes, which means once your hands know them for one kind of object they know them for all of them.

Picking up and putting down

To move something, select it and drag it to where it should go. The whole frame travels, with its contents, its wrap setting and its colours, so a picture with text wrapping round it carries that wrap to its new position and the story reflows around it.

Selecting is the step that trips people up most. A text box you're typing in is in editing mode, and dragging inside it selects words rather than moving the box. Click on the frame's edge, or click away and then click the box once, and you have the frame itself rather than its text. A picture works the same way in reverse: double-clicking a picture takes you into cropping, where dragging moves the picture inside its frame instead of moving the frame on the page. If something isn't behaving, check which of these you're in.

Handles for size and angle

A selected object shows handles around its edge. Drag a corner or a side handle to make the frame bigger or smaller. For a text box this changes how much room the words have, so a box that was showing a red plus for overflowing text may suddenly fit, or a box you've shrunk may start overflowing. For a picture frame it changes the window the picture is seen through, and the picture's fill, fit or stretch setting decides how the picture responds.

The rotation handle turns the object around its centre. Rotation is handy for stamps, stickers, tilted photos on a party invitation and text running up the side of a poster. Bear in mind one detail from the app's own notes: a rotated text box does not itself wrap around other objects. If you rotate a story box and then expect it to flow neatly round a picture, it won't, so keep rotation for short pieces of display text and leave the main stories upright.

What Shift does

Holding Shift while you drag constrains the movement. When you're resizing, that's how you keep a photo in proportion, so a portrait doesn't end up looking squashed or stretched. When you're rotating, it keeps the angle to tidy steps, which is the easy way to get a frame exactly square again after a bit of experimenting, or to turn a strip of text to a clean vertical. Get into the habit of pressing Shift whenever you resize a picture or a logo, because a slightly stretched logo is one of those things readers notice without knowing why.

Working with the other arranging tools

Dragging by eye is quick, but Publish by Zaweba gives you help so you don't have to rely on eyesight alone. Frames snap to guides, margins, other frames and the grid, and the rulers let you drag out guides to line things up against. The align and distribute commands do the fine work when several objects need to sit on the same line or be evenly spaced. A good rhythm is to drag things roughly into place first, then let snapping and alignment finish the job.

Grouping is the other partner. Once a heading, a rule and a small picture are grouped, moving, resizing or rotating acts on the whole set together, so a little badge or coupon block keeps its arrangement as you push it around the page. Locking does the opposite: it stops a background picture or a fixed panel from being picked up by accident while you work on the frames above it.

Small habits that save time

Resize text boxes to suit the words rather than the other way round. If a heading wraps onto a second line by one word, widening its box a touch is usually cleaner than shrinking the type. Keep an eye on the margins as you drag, especially for anything that has to print, and remember that only a picture or background deliberately stretched into the bleed should go past the edge of the page.

When a move goes wrong, undo it. Every drag is a step you can take back, so you can try a bolder angle or a bigger photo without worrying about losing the layout you had. Experimenting is cheap, and a few minutes of nudging is often the difference between a page that looks assembled and one that looks designed.