May 17th – A Week With iBooks Author

So we’ve come to our final day, with a few 3rd Party applications to come, and we’ve covered the basics, making shapes, widgets (all 9) and importing text and styling it.  Today we look at the little things that matter – the page layout.

May 17th – A Week With iBooks Author

As we’ve worked so hard to insert shapes, text and widgets to fulfill the content part of our book, we’ve probably noticed the lines that pop-up whenever we are moving around the widget or image.  We might have noticed the numbers that appear in blue when we are moving paragraphs back and forth.

iBooks Author is built on a grid system that automatically treats everything like an object around it and give you the center of a page (width and height) or the relative distance to other objects in the area.  This is incredibly helpful as you are working towards getting everything nice and uniform to publish on the iBooks Library.

Realistically this is a skill that involves a lot of hands on activity to move and resize the text, images and widgets to get everything to fit on a page.  But once you’re done and everything is lined up 17px away from the side of the page, you have something to be truly proud of.