Publishing with iBooks Author

Chapter 5. Layouts

You can create your own Chapter, Section, and Page layouts and add them to your Layout menu to use throughout your book. Go to View → Show Layouts, and a new section opens up above the Book menu showing all the different layout options. Click one, and it opens in the editing window. If all you want to do is make a few small changes to the canned layout, go ahead and do that here. A big red button will appear next to the page thumbnail in the Layouts window after you make a change; click it to apply your changes to the layout, which will also add them to any pages in your book that currently use that layout.

If you want to make a brand new layout from scratch, make sure you have a layout selected from the type you want to create (either Chapter, Section, or Page), and then in the Toolbar, click the Add Layout button (when you’re editing your regular pages, this button reads Add Pages). A new page or spread gets added to that group. Click twice on the name of the new page to rename it.

Note

In many other page layout programs, these kinds of layout pages are called master pages, because they control how all the rest of the pages look.

You can add as much as you want to a layout page—colorful boxes, footers with the page number, running headers with the chapter title or section title... the sky’s the limit (Figure 5-1)! If you want to be able to change your layout elements on a page-by-page basis, select that element and in the Layout Inspector turn on the “Editable on ...