How to make sure everything in your yearbook lines up.

There are a few tools in the EDO designer that can help you make sure that everything is lined up in a visually pleasing manner. Text and photo alignment is a quick and easy step you can take to make your book look professional and well put together. In this article we will go over the best alignment tools in our designer, so you can determine which ones are best for your needs.

Align and Distribute:

The Align tool is located on the top toolbar in the EDO designer. If you are not familiar with the EDO designer, click here to learn more about it.

The align tool to aid in arranging the elements on your page by lining them up left, center right, top, or bottom. Using the multiple selection tool (or multi select), you can select more than one element to begin arranging your page content. 

Once you multi select the frames you would like to align, you will next want to choose the way you would like them to be aligned. Refer to the photo below to understand the different directions a frame can be aligned

 Align Left – Moves all objects so that each left edge of an object is on the same line as the first object at the top of the selection,

Align Right – Moves all objects so that the right edge of each object matches up with the right edge of the top object.

Align Top – Moves all objects so that the top edge of each object matches up to the top edge of the first object.

Align Bottom – Move all objects so that the bottom edge of each object matches up with the bottom edge of the first object.

Align Horizontally – Moves all objects so that the horizontal center of each object aligns, forming a line in which the objects match up vertically.

Align Vertically – Moves all objects so that the vertical center of each object aligns, forming a line in which the objects match up horizontally.

The distribute tool is directly under the align tool. You will also need to use the multiple select action to use the distribute tool.

Again, please refer to the photo below to understand the frame directions we are referring to:

Distribute Left – Moves all objects so that the left edge of each object is spaced evenly from one another on the horizontal plane.

Distribute Right – Moves all objects so that the right edge of each object is spaced evenly from one another on the horizontal plane.

Distribute Top – Moves all objects so that the top edge of each object is spaced evenly between each object.

Distribute Bottom – Moves all objects so that the bottom edge of the objects is spaced evenly.

Distribute Vertically – Moves all objects so that the horizontal center of each object is spaced evenly between each object on the vertical plane.

Distribute Horizontally – Moves all objects so that the vertical center of each object is spaced evenly from one another on the horizontal plane.

Frame Indexing

This is the tool you use to send something to the front/back of another object. This tool is extremely useful in layering on a page. You will find this tool by selecting the object you would like to move, and right clicking.

Bring To Front – Will arrange the element to the front of the page layers.

Move Up – Will move an element forward on the page one layer. 

Move Down – Sends an element backwards once on the page one layer.

Send To Back – Sends an element to the back of the page layers. 

For example, below we see a photo of a building on top of a photo of a boy. If we would like that photo to go behind the picture of the boy, we would right-click the photo of the building:

Then Click the Highlighted “Send to Back” button.

Using View Preferences

The ‘view’ tab offers a list of filters and preferences that you can apply to your page to help make designing easier. To learn more about the different viewing preferences, click here.