The pageplanr editorial wall

Many editorial offices still have walls paved with printouts of the layouts of current productions. And for good reason: It is important not only to look at single pages or double pages, but also to see the flow of all pages of a print object next to each other in order to get a feeling for the flow through the whole object. Where tension arises, where there are repetitions and too little tension. Where should there perhaps be more peace and quiet, and where more variety.

The readers should always be able to orient themselves within the magazine or brochure and at the same time be animated to read on. The layout wall can be a great help to see, if the different parts of the project all have their distinct ‘flavour’ and provide the necessary orientation.

With pageplanr, the editorial wall cannot be completely replaced, we simply have to admit that. Even though you can import all layouts into pageplanr and thus assess the page flow very well, it is still different to stand in front of a wall with the layouts in their original size, there is no question about that.

But such a wall is also luxury, and if you don’t want or can’t afford this luxury, pageplanr is certainly a very good alternative for you.

Create images from your layouts

The question remains how the images of the page layouts get onto the pageplanr plan.

Simply take a quick screenshot and upload it to the pageplanr-plan would be a possibility at first glance, but this is rather time-consuming and inaccurate, especially if you have several pages.

Easier, faster and more accurate is the export from the layout program.

Adobe InDesign is more or less the industry standard at the moment, that’s why we show it here with the example of InDesign. The various alternatives to InDesign (QuarkXPress, Affinity Designer, etc.) also have the option of exporting the pages of a layout as images. Please refer to the documentation of these Apps to learn how to export your layouts to image files.

In the InDesign File menu, select “Export”, in the dialog box select “JPEG” and click on “Save”. As always with the export you can then make a few settings for the export. In this case in three sections:

First the page range, and as a rule you should not set spreads but pages for the output here.

The second section deals with the image quality of the images to be exported.

Under Quality you should set “Medium”. Even “Low” can be ok. But “High” or even “Maximum” doesn’t usually make sense, because the image files are only much bigger, while the display quality hardly increases. In individual cases you can try to get a much better impression, but in most cases “Medium” should be the optimal setting.

The Format Method has no effect on the image quality. “Progressive” can speed up the image composition in the pageplanr project, but the differences to “Standard” should be minimal.

This brings us to the most important points Resolution and Colour Space: 72 ppi should be selected for Resolution and RGB as Colour Space. A higher resolution only leads to larger image files and longer image build-up in pageplanr, and RGB is the Colour Space necessary for the web.

The settings in the third section “Options” are actually not relevant. Even if they can affect the exported images in some details, these details should be so small that they won’t be visible due to the JPG compression and the small image size. Depending on the layout, it may be better to disable anti-alias, but most of the time the results with anti-alias are better.

With a click on Export all selected pages will be saved in a new folder as single numbered files. From there you can drag and drop them one by one onto the corresponding pages in your pageplanr project. And voilà - the pageplanr editorial wall comes to life!

Whichever way you set your export options, please keep in mind the 500 kB file size limit when you create the images.

PS.: We’re working on a new feature regarding the import of your layout images. Drag’n’Droping all these images one by one can get tedious, right? So soon there will be a way to upload all your image files at once!