Page Strip

The page strip runs across the top of the document window. It shows thumbnails of your pages, and is where you organise your document’s page order.

View Modes

The page strip has three modes, chosen via the selector on the right:

• Source shows the raw pages from your imported PDFs and images, before any imposition. This is the mode you’ll use most of the time.
• Preview shows the placed spreads that will be used for imposition, but in the order that you’ll read the document. You can see which pages are facing pages, and how big the placement margins are.
• Imposition shows the pages as they’ll actually be printed, after imposition. This is useful for checking that everything looks right before you print.

In each of the modes, you can click to select pages. In Preview and Imposition modes, each spread or sheet may contain multiple pages, so you’ll have to click on the right location within the thumbnail!

Selecting Pages

Click a page to select it. The selection drives what’s shown in the sidebar — for example, the Source Page pane shows settings for whichever page is selected.

You can select multiple pages with Cmd+click (toggle individual pages) or Shift+click (select a range). When multiple pages are selected, changes you make in Octavo apply to all of them.

Organising Pages

Drag pages to reorder them. You can also:

• Copy (Cmd+C) and Paste (Cmd+V) pages, including between different documents. Pasted pages appear after the current selection.
• Duplicate (Cmd+D) pages in place.
• Delete selected pages with the Delete key.
• Insert a blank page from the Insert menu, or from the right-click context menu.

To import new source documents, you can drag a PDF or image file into the page strip. (See Importing Sources for more details.)

Automatic Blanks

Some imposition styles require a specific number of pages (e.g. booklets need a multiple of four). When this happens, Octavo adds blank pages automatically to make up the numbers. These are labelled “Blank page (automatic)” and will appear and disappear as needed — you don’t have to manage them yourself.

Media Indicators

If you’ve set up more than one media type, each page’s thumbnail shows a coloured stripe indicating which media it uses. This makes it easy to see at a glance which pages will print on which paper.