Pages

Comic Life is a special page layout program designed for making comics easy. A comic is laid out on one or more pages. When first started Comic Life presents you with an empty page in the edit area with its associated thumbnail in the page organizer.

A Note on Page Sizes

By default Comic Life is configured to show a page that's suitable for the web. You can change the page size by choosing the "File->Page Format..." menu and picking a different Page Size in the popup menu:
You can also adjust other page settings here including specifying a completely custom page size.
By default, sizes are specified in points - there are 72 points to an inch and 28.35 points to a centimeter. You can change this in Preferences

Preference Pane

Tip: If you have a particular page size you always want Comic Life to use you should specify that in the Preferences.

Laying out a page

You could immediately start adding images and balloons or what ever you like to this page, but most comics are laid out as a series of panels that let you structure your story. Comic Life provides a couple of easy ways to create a particular panel layout for your page.

Layout options

Grid layout

To create a page with a regular grid layout where each panel is the same size as the others use the "Page->New Page with Grid Layout...". A sheet appears where you can specify the number of rows and columns for the page and a gutter.

Note: The gutter is the spacing between the cells and the margin.
Enter the rows, columns and gutter values you desire and click the OK button. A new page is created after the current page.

Template layout

Page templates provide many irregular page layouts which you can view in the Page Template browser which is described in the next section: Libraries.

Custom layout

Comic Life also lets you design a completely custom layout by placing panels directly on the page and adjusting them to suit your needs. See the Panels section for more information.

Adding pages

There are four ways to create a new page:

Blank Page

To create a new blank page use the "Page->New Blank Page" menu item. A blank page is added after the current page.

Page with grid layout

Use the "Page->New Page with Grid Layout..." option described above.

Page from a template

At any point you can drag a page template on top of the current page being edited and create a new page with that template.

Page from current page

You can easily create a new page of panels based upon the layout of the current page. Choose "Page->New Page like Current Page".

Deleting pages

To delete a page make sure it is displayed in the edit area either by selecting it in the organizer or by using the "View->Page Up" or "View->Page Down" menu items.

Once the page is selected choose the "Page->Delete Page" menu item. A confirmation sheet is displayed. Clicking "OK" will delete the page.

Reorganizing pages

You can change the order of pages in the organizer by dragging pages up and down the organizer:

1. 2. 3.

Page Controls

A small portion of the window is dedicated to some handy page controls as shown below:

The "+" button adds a new blank page after the current page. The "-" button deletes the current page (after you have confirmed the action in a sheet). Clicking on the button with a gear reveals the context menu for working with pages. This menu can also by revealed by Cmd clicking on the page organizer:

Most of these menu items have been described before so we'll focus on the additional entries.

Make Text on Page Bigger increases the size of all the text in balloons and captions on the page.

Make Text on Page Smaller decreases the size of all the text in balloons and captions on the page.

Delete All Text on Page deletes all the text in balloons and captions on the page.

Note: lettering elements are not affected by these three actions.
These actions are also available in the Page menu on the menu bar.

Page Details

There are no special options for pages.

Page Styles

See the Page section of the Working with Stylesheets section.