Formatting pages

Choosing a page layout

Every page in your presentation has a choice of pre-defined layouts or arrangements for the items on the page.

Most styles include nine basic layouts:

Text, with picture on the left
Text, with picture on the right
Big picture with caption
Contact information
Text only
Gallery, with three pictures
Four weblinks
Four maillinks
Four filelinks

These layouts allow you a general choice of page formats within a presentation. Others have more specialist use; the Contact page includes space for address and phone and working links for e-mail and website, for example, and the web link, mail link and file link layouts let you make presentations that connect to a variety of other resources.

To select a layout:

Choose Page in the Designer
Click Layout
Select a layout in the layout gallery

Your chosen layout is loaded immediately and any items on the page are rearranged to suit the new layout. Note that you cannot adjust the items on the page or their arrangement in the layout but that you can tweak the look of a page by suitably formatting the text or the images.

Being able to change layouts quickly makes it easy to try different options for a page. Be aware however that some layouts do not include all the items on others. If for example, you select a gallery layout and add three pictures but then change the layout to big picture only, you will only see the first of your pictures. CDR Presenter will keep the other pictures in the presentation in case you switch layouts again but they will not be visible.

Page options

Clicking Page then Options in the Designer displays a dialog box with various settings that control how a page is presented.

Background image

Each page normally has a background set by the style you have chosen for a presentation. You may in some special cases want to import your own background image or just use a plain colour. If you want to use your own image, you must save it as a Windows .BMP file that is 800 pixels wide by 600 pixels high and is saved in a 24-bit colour (sometimes called 'millions of colours'). Most painting and drawing programs can produce such an image, if necessary resizing an existing image. Imported background images can add impact but not all images will work well with all styles, depending on other elements on a page such as the look and position of headlines and buttons.

Music or soundtrack

You can set overall background music for a presentation with the Project... Background music buttons on the Designer. This music, if any, normally plays continuously while the user browses pages. The music and soundtrack settings for a page let you vary this for an individual page. You can

Select 'None' to turn the background music off on a particular page
Select 'Background music' to play the usual music
Select 'Custom' and then choose your own piece of music or sound track or special effect for the page. The program will let you select a WAV or MP3 type file to add to your project.

If you do select a custom file for the sound, you may set two further options. Pause before starting inserts a short delay after a page loads before the sound starts. This is effective if you have a spoken commentary or other sounds that particularly go with the text and images on a page. Loop causes the sound file to be played repeatedly while the page is displayed. This generally works for files prepared to be used as background music or looping sound effects.

Special effects

You can control the way a page is displayed:

Animate page when it appears
This is normally on. Unchecking it removes the animation used to a build each page when it first appears. You may want to turn it off on pages in long sections to speed things up for the user.
Hide menu buttons
This option hides the normal button bar. This is normally only useful on pages within a section.
Hide Next and Previous buttons
This option hides the Next and Previous buttons. It is normally only used with the automatic change to next page option (see below).
Transition
Selects one of a variety of special effects used when pages first load.
Change to next page
Allows a page to progress automatically to the next after a set period. This option is useful to create a step-by-step sequence or picture gallery with a group of pages.