Changing Print Layouts Landscape to Portrait

[teknobilly]

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

[gwpriester]

Welcome to TalkGraphics

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

[teknobilly]

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.


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


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.


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


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.


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



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:


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?

[gwpriester]

Sorry I asked.

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

[Fin]

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.

[teknobilly]

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

Billy