Document designer: design your own PDF documents

With the document designer you lay out a document once — a catalogue, tear sheets, an artist's CV — and WrkLst fills it with the data of any exhibition, works or artist and makes it a PDF. Texts, pictures and shapes go exactly where you place them. This article describes WrkLst 10.

What a design is

A design is the layout of a document: its paper size, margins, letterhead and fonts, and its pages with texts, pictures and shapes on them. Instead of typing a title, you put a field such as Exhibition title into a text; when the PDF is made, the field is filled from the record. So one design works for every exhibition — the booklet of this summer's show and of next year's.

A design is made from one kind of record:

• Exhibition — title, dates, artists, installation views and all works of an exhibition.
• Works — one work or a selection of works, for tear sheets and checklists.
• Contacts — one contact or a selection, for letters and labels.
• Artist biography — an artist's biography and CV.

You can add more data later — for example the biography of each artist of the exhibition, after the exhibition pages.

Starting a design

1. Open Document designer in the sidebar and choose New design.
2. Under 1. What is it based on? choose the kind of record, under 2. Start from an Empty page or a ready-made design — Exhibition booklet, Tear sheets or Artist CV — and under 3. Name give it a name.
3. Choose Create design. The editor opens, already filled with one of your records, so you see the design with real data from the start. More data — an artist's biography, a cover picture, a PDF — can be added later, whenever the document needs it.

Getting started, at the top of Selection while nothing is selected, walks you through the rest: your basis, the pages, more data, fonts and letterhead, and the PDF or the share menu. Each step shows whether it is done and opens the place where it is done.

The list of designs shows All designs you may see, or only Mine. Every design shows who may see it and what it is made from. In its ⋯ menu, Make a copy starts your own design from it, and Delete design removes it.

The editor

On the left, Pages lists the Letterhead and the pages of the design in order. Under each page it says how it pages — One page, one page for each work with the number in the preview, or a text that runs on over as many pages as it needs — and under the open page its elements are listed (see Layers). ‹ Page 2 of 4 › above the page switches pages. The open page is in the middle; on the right are its properties in four tabs: Selection, Document, Data and Use. Every change is saved a moment later — the bar says All changes saved — and Undo and Redo go back and forth.

The design is filled with a record of the kind it is based on. To see it with another one, open Data and choose it under Preview with. This is only for the preview: the design works with every record.

Texts, pictures and shapes

Add them with the buttons in the bar: Add text, Add picture, Add rectangle and Add line. Add picture offers a Picture from the data (an installation view or a work's picture, which changes with the record), a picture From the media library, or Upload a logo or picture… — an SVG, PNG or JPG placed on the page in its own shape and saved to the media library. An SVG logo stays sharp at any size in the PDF, and a PNG keeps its transparent background.

• Click something on the page to select it, Shift-click to select several. Drag to move it, the handles to resize it. It snaps to the margins, the middle of the page and the other items, and a line shows where; hold Alt to place it freely. The arrow keys move it by 1 mm, with Shift by 10 mm.
• Under Selection, Left, Top, Width and Height place it to the tenth of a millimetre; Rotation and Opacity are there too. Fill the page makes it the size of the paper — for a picture that runs to the edge — and Fill to the margins the size inside the margins.
• Delete removes the selection, Cmd/Ctrl + D duplicates it, and Bring to front and Send to back change what lies on top.

A text is written under Text. Click a field below the text — Exhibition title, Artists, Dates … — to insert it; it is filled with the data when the PDF is made. Choose its Text style — Headline, Body text, Caption or one of your own, see Text styles — and change the Font, Size, Weight, Line spacing, Letter spacing, Colour or Alignment where this text should differ; Back to the style removes those changes again. Shrink the text to fit makes a long title smaller so that it fits its frame. Repeat for each writes the text once for every entry of a list — for example every artist's name, one per line or separated by commas.

A picture comes From the data — the first picture of a work, an installation view — From the media library, where you can also upload one, or is Chosen when made. Fill the frame crops it to the frame, Show it whole shows all of it. To choose what shows, double-click the picture on the page and drag it; Zoom crops closer. With Keep proportions when resizing a logo or picture keeps its shape when you drag a corner — hold Shift to do the opposite for one drag — and Fit the frame to the picture's shape makes the frame exactly as tall as the picture needs.

A rectangle or line has a Fill colour, a Line and Rounded corners.

Pages

Add a page with + above the pages:

• Page — one page with texts, pictures and shapes placed freely, such as the cover.
• Repeating page — one page for each entry of a list: a tear sheet for every work of the exhibition. Its texts and pictures show that entry; the arrows above the page step through the entries.
• Text flow — a long text, such as a press release or an artist's CV, that runs over as many pages as it needs inside the margins. What you place on a text-flow page appears on each of its pages.
• Attached PDF — a PDF added between your pages, see below.

When nothing on the page is selected, Selection shows the page itself: the Data of this page, whether it Repeats, Show the letterhead and its Background colour. A page's ⋯ menu duplicates, moves and deletes it.

Layers

Under the open page in Pages, its elements are listed in the order they lie on each other — the topmost first. Drag an element by its grip, or use the arrow keys on the grip, to put it in front of or behind another. The eye hides an element, on the page and in the PDF; the lock keeps it from being moved by a click on the page — select it in the list instead. Clicking an element of another page opens that page with the element selected.

Letterhead

Select Letterhead in the pages list and add your logo, your address or a line. They appear on every page that has Show the letterhead switched on.

Attached PDFs

An Attached PDF page adds the pages of a PDF at that point — an artist's biography, a price list, a condition report. Under Which PDF, choose:

• Always this PDF — one PDF from the media library: picked, uploaded, or made once from a WrkLst template, for example an artist's biography; it is saved in the media library.
• Choose each time — you are asked for the PDF each time the design is made. The PDF set here is suggested.
• Make it automatically — made from a WrkLst template for the record of each run, so it is always up to date: choose what it is Made for — the exhibition, or each artist of it — and the Template. The PDF takes a little longer this way.

Only PDFs can be attached; a confidential file is never added.

Document settings

Under Document: the Paper size (A4, A5, A3, US Letter, US Legal or a custom size), Portrait or Landscape, the Margins — the dashed line on the page — and the font, size, line spacing and colour of the document's text.

Text styles

Under Document, Text styles names the kinds of text your document uses — a new design starts with Headline, Body text and Caption — and gives each its font, size, weight, line spacing, letter spacing and colour. Every text picks one, so changing a style changes every text that uses it. + adds a style, the bin removes one.

Fonts

The font lists show Your fonts first, then about twenty ready-to-use families sorted into Sans serif and Serif — among them Inter, Arimo (like Arial), Montserrat, Open Sans, DM Sans, EB Garamond, Lora and Playfair Display. Under Your fonts you can upload your own font files (TTF, OTF, WOFF or WOFF2) for every design of your account — one file per weight and style, with the same Font name for all of them.

More data

Data shows your Basis first: the kind of record the design is based on, and the one the preview shows. Below it, More data is optional: Add data adds another record or a picture the design needs — for example Artist biography. For an exhibition design, Each artist of the exhibition takes every artist of the exhibition, one after the other. A record or picture is either Set here or you Ask each time: then it is asked for whenever the design is made, and what is set here is suggested.

To show it, choose it as the Data of this page of a page — a text flow of the artist's CV, for example.

Making the PDF

Choose Make PDF, choose the record — the one of the preview to begin with — and answer what the design asks for. The PDF is made in the background: Downloads at the top shows how far it is and hands it to you when it is ready.

Using a design in Exhibitions, Works, Contacts or Biographies

Under Use, Show in the … share menu adds the design to the share menu of its module, like any other PDF template — for an exhibition design the share menu of every exhibition. Only for one record shows it on one exhibition only. When the design asks for something, the share menu asks before the PDF is made. Where you add documents to a record, the design is also offered to make the PDF straight into the media library.

Who sees and changes a design

Under Use, Who sees it:

• Everyone — everyone in your account can use and change it.
• Everyone, only I change it — everyone can use it and make a copy; only you can change it.
• Only me — nobody else sees it.

A design someone else made is changed by Make a copy: the copy is yours.

Designing needs a larger screen. On a phone you can look through the pages and make the PDF.