Hello, this is Cristi. Today we will look at some options for the page size
and layout in Xara Designer Pro X. This is the latest version
of Xara and I am showing you how to change the page size, so when you start a
document if you want to start a document for print as you know, Xara Designer Pro
supports layouts and page links and text links and all that stuff, so you can use
it for designing stuff for print or magazines or brochures and things like
that which you can do also in Adobe InDesign for example. So first you start
by creating a File - New and you create a new document so here you have the main
and most used types of documents but also sizes so if I want to start with an
A4 document for example you can choose A4 portrait and this is your default and
here you go, you have a a full sheet you can design
stuff on. I'm just gonna drag an object in here so there you go.Now if you want
to change the size of the page once you've started and maybe you've designed
some stuff already and you don't want to copy and paste it into a new document,
you can change the size of the document so it's very easy to do that, just
right-click on the page and change click on Page Options this will bring up the
dialog that shows your page size which is the one you have at the moment,
A4 and you can select here if you want to choose a different one - let's try
maybe US Letter for example, and click apply so that will adjust your page size
but it won't shift your content around because if the size is different, then
you will have to rearrange some of the stuff you've done. You have options
for automatically resizing the content of your page when you change the size of
the page, so let me show you how you do that. I
have some text here a paragraph of text, a title and also an image so I'm
gonna right-click on the page here and choose page options, so my current page
is A4 but if I cancel this and right-click on auto-fit to page first
then I have here option to reposition all of the objects on my page to adapt
to the page size changes and that means if I make my page smaller or larger my
objects will try and follow my size and resize automatically. So let's see how
that works I'm gonna click Auto-fit all objects and you can choose to fit just
the width or both the width and height. So I'm gonna set it to both width and
height, click apply. Nothing has changed so far, so let me
just right-click on the page now and choose page options and I'm gonna change
from an A4 page to a smaller sized page maybe an A6 which would be, will be
smaller so watch what happens when I resize this my content has scaled down
as well. What if I change to landscape?
Click 'Apply' - you will see it's not so perfect. So if it cannot fit the
content it will at least just move it and crop it so you will have to see if
this works for you. Let's try and change this back to an A4 size - Apply. So now it
has scaled everything up, so you can see it's a bit funny how it interprets the
sizes of the objects, so obviously it's applied some clipping here so this may
not be what you want. Always see if that works for you and
you know, in the best case scenario and it's no wonder this option is off by
default - the auto-fit is off because it may not work for everyone and it may
actually be more work to fix your document once it's doing all this
automatic scaling, instead of just manually doing it yourself, when you have
the new page size. So if I go auto-fit to
page, Auto-fit all objects, click 'Apply' and now I will change my page to A6
again. Landscape, 'Apply', you will see now I have the freedom to just take my objects
myself and select them all, and resize them and rearrange them on my page the
way I want, without clipping and without having it destroy my paths or
paragraphs or everything. So this is one of the features you can do. Another way
if you don't really care about what your gonna print on so maybe when you create
a PDF at the end you allow printing to shrink the document automatically or fit
it onto a larger sheet, then you can actually manually change the page size,
so in previous versions of Xara you used to be able to just move your cursor
to the edge of the page and drag. At the moment it's still possible to do that,
but you need to first unlock the page, so the way to do that is right-click here
on the page, click 'Page options', and from here first un-tick this box, 'Lock page size'.
This will allow you, once you click 'Apply', to manually change the size of the
page by clicking on the edge, the right edge and the bottom edge by doing this,
like that. OK, now, another thing you may want to do is, for example you want to
create a custom page and you know the dimensions you
want to do. So the way to do that is of course right-click on the page, click
'Page options', and then select 'custom' here.
You see, it's already selected custom
because I have manually dragged the edges of my page and I've changed it here, but
if you don't, let's say you had an A4 before, right and you right-click now
'Page options' and I choose 'custom then it' allows you here to set the width and
height yourself. So let's say I want to have 10
centimeters by 10 centimeters, click 'apply' and there you go, my page has
changed size to what I specified.
Another option you might may want to do
is, if you want to design on a different coloured page, not white, you can right-click
on this and go to 'page background' and click 'Edit page color'. Now you can't
change the color here because there's no color, as it says, so you can click on
this drop-down and choose 'color' and now you can choose what color you want your
page to be. So as you click and change your colors from here, you can see it
changing on your page, so let's say we want to kind of, even black that is
fine, you can choose and then close. So this is gonna be the color of your page.
So now you can just design your stuff.
Another tip: if you are designing a
document for print like a magazine or newspaper or brochure, and you have
multiple pages and especially if you're linking text across pages and everything,
so you would like to have a different layout, in the default Xara layout you
see the pages one after the other, so as you scroll down you go to the other
pages, but you also can show the pages side by side. So you right-click on the
page, 'page options' and choose 'double page'.
So this will show the pages side by side
like this - so you can even design stuff that you know, goes across the edges or
you can see your publication like a normal newspaper for example, with two
pages. So this is very useful in that scenario.
Thank you for watching, I hope
this tutorial has been informative and useful for you. If you enjoy my videos,
please subscribe to my channel and stay tuned for next time.