Text boxes and typing in Publish by Zaweba

In a page layout program, words never sit loose on the page. They live in text boxes, and the box decides where the text can go. Once that idea clicks, Publish by Zaweba feels straightforward: draw a box where you want words, type, and then shape the words and the box separately until the page looks right.

Drawing a box and typing

To add text, draw a text box on the page and start typing in it. The box can be as large as a full column of a newsletter or as small as a price tag on a menu. Its size is the space the words are allowed; if you type more than fits, the extra text is held back rather than spilling over the page, and the box shows that it is too full.

It helps to think about boxes before words. A flyer might have one box for the headline, one for the details and one for a short line of small print at the bottom. Keeping those separate means you can move or resize each part without disturbing the others, and you can line them up with the margins and with each other.

Changing how the words look

Select some text and you can apply bold, italic, underline, colour, size and font. These are the everyday changes: a bigger, bolder headline, a coloured date that catches the eye, an italic line for a quotation. Select only the words you mean to change, so a stray click does not turn a whole paragraph red.

For anything that repeats, such as every heading in a newsletter, you will save time with named styles rather than setting each heading by hand. Direct formatting is perfect for one-off touches, and styles are better for consistency.

Copy and paste keeps formatting inside the app. If you copy a styled line from one box and paste it into another, it arrives looking the same. That makes it easy to reuse a carefully set phone number or a coloured strapline across several pages.

Fonts and missing characters

Publish uses the fonts installed on your system, so anything you already have in Windows is available. When a font does not contain a character you type, such as an accented letter or a symbol, the app uses a fall-back font for that character rather than leaving a gap. It is still sensible to check the result, because a fall-back letter can look different from its neighbours, and choosing a font that covers the characters you need gives a tidier finish.

A practical tip is to pick two fonts for a publication and stick to them, one for headings and one for body text. It is tempting to try a new font in every box, but pages look calmer and more professional when the type is consistent.

Why the screen and the PDF agree

The text engine in Publish measures each letter from the font's own advance widths, which are the spacing figures built into the font file. Because the same measurements are used on screen, in pictures of the page and in the PDF, line breaks fall in the same places everywhere. A headline that fits on one line on screen fits on one line in the PDF, and a story that ends at the bottom of a column does so in print too.

This matters most when a print shop is involved. Nobody wants to discover in a proof that the last word of a paragraph has jumped onto a new line and pushed the details off the page.

In exported PDFs the text stays real, selectable text. Someone reading your newsletter on screen can select a phone number or an address and copy it, and search in a PDF reader finds words as you would expect.

Small habits that help

Leave a little breathing room in each box rather than filling it to the last line, so a late correction does not cause overflow. Zoom in when you check small print, because a typo in a phone number is easy to miss at page view. And when a page has several boxes, decide the job each one does before you start (headline, details, footer) so you are building a layout rather than just adding words.

Text boxes are the foundation for almost everything else in Publish by Zaweba, from linked stories across pages to columns and text that wraps around pictures.