Getting around
Here is a tour of how windows are laid out in Laidout.
Laidout documents are built around impositioning, and every document is ultimately derived from one of three types of imposition:
- Singles. A collection of single, isolated pages. These can be arranged in so called art boards.
- Signatures. Custom folded book signatures, which can be folded on screen.
- Nets, such as accordion folds, or from unwrapping polyhedra, for instance a box, dodecahedron, or a triacontahedron. Note that pages in nets do not have to be rectangular!
When you run for the first time, there’s a New Document dialog, from which you can select from a variety of templates based around the three base imposition types.
Viewport
Once you have set up a new document, you enter the Viewport. Around the edges clockwise from top left, you can access:
- Document menu, from which you can open the Imposition Editor
- Viewport zoom controls
- Settings, under the question mark
- Export, import images, import vector files
- Add, remove, clip pages
- Document navigation buttons
- Tools and Overlays
Common conventions include:
- Control-drag to scale objects around click point
- Control-shift-drag to rotate objects around click point
- Right click (without dragging and without holding shift, control, or alt) is almost always a context menu
- Middle click and drag pans. If you don’t have a middle button, pan with shift-Right-button
- Click on numbers without dragging to edit the number in an input box.
- Tab and shift-tab selects next or previous object
- Pressing F1 will popup a shortcut browser of the current tool
Window panels
Around the border of the Viewport is a very thin gap, from which you can right click to select options to split the window to other panels. All the possible window panel types are:
- Viewport
- Spread editor
- Palette editor
- Text editor
- Command prompt
- Layers. This one is a work in progress, and probably doesn’t work very much.
