Changing Print Layouts Landscape to Portrait

I need to produce a PDF with a portrait print layout, but the design is much more suited to working in Landscape. In Designer Pro, flipping between Landscape mode and portrait mode is very frustrating.

After changing the print layout mode, only the page has been altered.
- Next you have to rotate and reorient your images
- I'm not able to rotate the guides, so I need reorient them for the page boundaries as well

WhileI understand that not all people need the image to be rotated and re-oriented, this seems like an ideal default for Xara

Does anyone have any good tips for doing this more effectively?

Thanks,
Billy
Xara Designer Pro X

Welcome to TalkGraphics

I'm following but I am not following. Can you post an example of your layout?

Yeah, I find the process confusing itself, trying to explain as briefly as possible is only going to lead to problems :)

What I am creating is Flash cards for teachers to be used with young learners, they are visually engaging, and I don’t have permission to use the graphics from my partner so I came up with a simple example of creating tickets.

To start with the layout I might create a grid of background blocks, set one aside for developing the content.
Attachment 118944

Lets say I’m happy with this as the template for the ticket design:
Attachment 118945

I would like to put them onto the page now so I can start to customize each ticket.
So I change the print layout to Landscape, only the page changes orientation. The drawing is still as it was in portrait mode.
Attachment 118946

Okay, not to big of a deal, I can rotate the blocks easily enough, then re-orient them to the top corner of the page:
BTW, the blocks are on a background layer, so I need to unlock that lay before rotating
Attachment 118947

So now I can get busy, working on adding tickets to the page, alignment is a struggle, but I plod along...
I think the bg blocks have 0 line weight, so aligning rectangles with line weight is cumbersome.
Attachment 118948

Now, I can create a template page, create 12 more and go through an customize each ticket. (I didn't for this demo :-O )
Attachment 118949


Now I can rotate it back to Portrait mode to get it back to the customer. Perhaps this is where I am complicating things. I think distributing PDFs with pages in Landscape mode is going to cause printing headaches for non-technical types. To ease their burden and mine, I would like to change the orientation of the pages to portrait, so that by default the PDF’d page will print by default correctly.

So I rotate it back and go through the same steps of Page Options, change to portrait, Unlock BG blocks. Select drawing, rotate 90, re-orient to the page:
Attachment 118950

But I have 12 pages of customized tickets (Flash Cards) each is different, and I have this Process for each page. It’s a lot of work that seems unnecessary.

Perhaps I’m spoiled, I’ve been working with Krita a little, and you can rotate your workspace 360 degrees without affecting the orientation of the drawing. It’s a brilliant feature. Hopefully Xara could implement that. :)

I'm not seeing a lot of options to quicken this process, does anyone have any suggestions?

Sorry I asked. :)

You can edit text even if it is vertical. Not sure if that will help much.

I do this all day long (seems like!). The quickest way I've come up with is to have two versions of the same file, one portrait the other landscape. That way the guidelines (once set) don't have to be messed with. I simply work on one in landscape mode, then copy and paste to the portrait mode and rotate to match the guide lines. When finished, I delete the landscape file. Only adds a few minutes to the process. My habit for guidelines is to use four red lines that are longer than the width and height of the page, formed into a rectangle for the art area. That gets deleted of course. This works for files to be printed on office machines, not so much for professional print houses (which I never use). Hope this inspires a solution for you.

That does seem to reduce the process by a step or two thank you!

Billy

Hi Billy and welcome to Talk Graphics. You do seem to be confusing the subject far more than is required. I suggest before you start to create your template you decide whether you need them in portrait or landscape orientation.

What gives with all this swapping orientation?

If you're going to make tickets two abreast in either portrait or landscape then they are obviously going to be of two different widths. The widths of a portrait ticket are going to be less than a landscape image. Do you require greater width for the tickets than can be produced on portrait mode? Then use landscape mode. Following me so far?

Having decided which orientation you wish to use, stick to it. Create your template within that mode.

Finally Save and Export your Xara template as a pdf.

The pdf will print in whatever orientation it was created in without the need to change your printer settings..

Thanks Egg,
I think you missed the part where I mentioned that the layout is the same in either portrait or landscape. The problem is that I have a nasty tendency to visualize graphics with a level orientation. I found that rather than rotating the page, I can turn my laptop on it's side and work on the graphics in that manner. This make using the mouse much more awkward, but I'm getting used to it. :P

The real problem is each ticket or area is customized, working in portrait mode is awkward to manage all the bits and pieces. I prefer turning the page on it's side in landscape mode.

As for printing, every print driver is different, and there are many applications interpreting PDFs with different results. I have wasted many frustrating hours trying to get a landscape orientated file to print properly. A burden I don't want to pass onto my customers. So I like to send PDFs out in portrait, and request they use Adobe Acrobat to view/ print the files.

In the "page options" which is in the File Menu you have a "Custom Page Size" make that page size to your landscape ticket size. You can lock that page size so that every extra page will be the same size giving you the option of making each ticket different. You can also make your basic design a "Live Copy" which will make your life easier and stop this standing on your head/turning laptop. Here is a copy of part of the Help file: Live Copies give you a way of having multiple copies of an object that are linked together so that if one copy is changed they all change. However each Live Copy can be transformed independently, so for example you could have larger and smaller versions of the same Live Copy, or perhaps copies with different rotations.

Once you have all of your designs done start a new doc in A4 portrait put in your guides/grid. For tickets I use rectangle drawn in the guide layer and drag + right click with the mouse to duplicate till your sheet is full. With this done open your ticket design file and Ctrl+C each page design into your Guide/template doc. and do a quick rotation of -90 degrees. Doing this way only really stops you rotating your laptop. If your going to be doing a huge amount of these cards I would seriously think about using a DTP programme and if it is just changing text in each of the cards/tickets you could import a CVS file into the programme to a field where you want the text to change. Hope that helps your problem!

Oh wow, you're blowing my mind!

Thank you this sounds exactly like what I'm looking for. I'll give a good whirl and report back.

Thanks a bunch.

Try messing about with this xar file. It uses Live Copies as Peter (Albacore) suggests.

Yeah! Great demo Mr Egg.

My experience was very similar, and it saved me some work already. I created a system very much like your demo, and created the latest batch of flash cards for my wife. Then she tweaked the design... expecting a big sigh, instead she got "no problem", showed her how to apply the change to the template and instantly a a dozen pages of flash cards were updated. Fantastic!

I did mess one batch of flash cards up, for the various grades there is a different file for each. On the second or third file, I copied a page in, and then whenever I needed a new page I pasted in another page. The live copies were not linked. I found that after I copy a page with live copies on it, I need to copy that new page, before pasting in additional copies.

Very cool.
Thanks again Fin, Albacore, and Egg
Billy

Glad to hear you've got it sorted. I don't copy pages, I just select the page in the P&L Gallery and hit the duplicate button. This does copy the live copies across.