Undo, redo and the undo history in Publish by Zaweba

Nothing you do to a page has to be permanent. Publish by Zaweba keeps unlimited undo and redo for as long as the session lasts, and Edit > Undo history lists every step you've taken so you can go back to any one of them in a single move.

That changes how you work. Instead of making careful, timid changes in case they can't be reversed, you can try a different colour scheme, swap a picture, reflow a story or drag half the page around, then decide. If it was a mistake, it's gone again in a moment.

Undo and redo, step by step

Undo takes back the last thing you did. Do it again and it takes back the one before, and so on as far as you like within the session. Redo puts back what you've just undone, which is the quickest way to compare two versions of a layout: undo to see the old one, redo to see the new one, and flick between them until you've made up your mind.

Redo only lasts until you make a fresh change. If you undo three steps and then type a word or move a frame, those three undone steps are replaced by the new direction. That's normal behaviour in almost every program, but it's worth remembering when you're comparing versions. Decide before you start editing again.

Jumping back with the history

Pressing undo twenty times to get back to where you were an hour ago is tedious and easy to overshoot. Edit > Undo history solves that. It shows a list of every step in the session, and you pick the point you want to return to. Everything after it is undone together.

This is the tool for the moment when a page has drifted. You've been fiddling with a newsletter's front page, the spacing has gone odd, and you can't quite remember which change did it. Open the history, go back to the step just before you started fiddling, and look again with fresh eyes. If the old version was better, carry on from there. If not, redo brings the changes back.

Why it's reliable

Publish keeps whole-document snapshots for undo rather than trying to reverse each change piece by piece. The practical upshot is that undo puts the document back exactly as it was at that step, text flow, wrapping and all, rather than an approximation of it. It also means big actions behave sensibly. A replace all in Find and replace is a single undo step, so a careless replacement across every story comes back in one go. Changes made by the optional AI tools are also one undo step each, and a picture edited in Paint by Zaweba and saved back into Publish arrives as an undoable change.

Where undo stops

The history belongs to the session. When you close the publication or the app, the list goes with it, and the next time you open the file you start with a clean history. Undo isn't a substitute for saving or for keeping copies.

So pair it with good saving habits. Save when a page reaches a state you're happy with. Before a drastic change, such as switching to a completely different colour scheme or reworking a whole spread of stories, save a copy of the file under a new name. That gives you a fixed point to return to tomorrow, long after today's undo history has been cleared.

Using undo as a design tool

The best use of undo is not fixing slips but trying ideas. Put the photo on the left, look at it, undo, put it on the right. Try a bolder headline font, look, undo. Run a font scheme from the Format menu to see the whole publication in a different style, and if it doesn't suit, take it back in one step. Because nothing is lost, you can afford to be curious, and curiosity is how ordinary flyers turn into good ones.

Undo, redo and the history list are small features, but they're the reason Publish by Zaweba feels relaxed to work in. You can always get back.