Set up a book step by step, and turn it landscape

A new book walks you through its setup#

Press B, or the rail's Book button, on a desk with no book and a short setup opens. Four steps: binding, sheet, page, name. Select photographs first and they become pages in the order they sit on the desk. Escape at any step leaves the desk exactly as it stood.

Each step says what your choice means in the hand. Pick saddle and it tells you how the booklet is made: print duplex, fold the pile in half, staple twice on the fold. Pick a sheet and it tells you the page that comes out of it, so choosing A4 under saddle reads back as a 148 × 210 mm page, an A5. You decide with the consequences in view.

Why a walk-through? Binding, sheet and trim shape every page in the book, and they used to live in a settings card you found after the layout existed. Met there, changing them felt like repair. Met first, they are choices.

The setup card stays for quick adjustments. Its new Walk through setup button runs the same steps for a book that already exists, so a book can be reshaped the way it was made.

Books turn landscape#

A book can be landscape now. The setup card grows an Orientation row, portrait or landscape, and the wizard asks the same question on its page step. Wide photographs get wide pages.

The print side follows for real. A stack or perfect book prints on landscape sheets with the correct duplex flip, and the summary line under the card says exactly what will come out of the printer. A landscape book binds on the left, the same as a portrait one, so it reads like any book turned on its side.

One geometry to know: a saddle booklet folds its sheet in half, so two landscape pages sit side by side across the fold and the sheet keeps blank margins above and below. The page is still the largest that fits.

Books you already made stay portrait until you say otherwise. And where a format fixes the page shape, the row dims and says why instead of disappearing: the Selphy card is one fixed size, and a fold-8 zine cuts its pages from one folded sheet.

Drop photographs on a book to add pages#

Drag photos from the desk or the tray and drop them on the felt around a book. Each one becomes a new page at the end, in the order you carried them. A small pill rides the pointer and says what the drop will do: Adds a new page, or Adds 5 new pages. Dropping onto a page keeps its old meaning and replaces what that frame holds. One undo takes the whole drop back.

This replaces the add-to-book dialog. B now simply opens and closes the Book card, the way E opens editing, and the book a photo joins is the book you drop it on. With more than one book on the desk, that ambiguity never comes up again.

Printing says what a sheet can hold#

Three places where the print path used to go quiet now speak up.

Type a trim larger than the sheet and binding allow and Abney tells you the size you actually got, in millimetres, instead of silently writing different numbers into the fields.

Cut marks that sit too close to the sheet edge for a printer to put down are left off rather than printed as half marks a knife might still follow. The setup card names the page size to stay inside if you want them all.

A fold-8 zine is one sheet, eight pages. A fold-8 book past eight pages used to export as separate zines that cannot join into one. Now the print button waits, the reason is written under it, and the card suggests saddle when the book wants to be longer.

Also in this release#

• The rail button is named Book. In the right-click menu, Add to book adds straight to the current book, and New book starts a second one.
• The book card always offers the name field now, so naming a book is part of settling it, not a feature that appears once you have two.
• A dense photo grid on a small page no longer collapses into sliver-thin cells.
• The tour's last step points at the Book button it talks about.