From the course: Affinity Publisher Essential Training

Pin objects inline with text - Publisher Tutorial

From the course: Affinity Publisher Essential Training

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Pin objects inline with text

- In this movie, we'll see how to pin objects as inline items so they flow with text in Affinity Publisher. The first thing to understand about pinning items is that you have two main choices. You can either float items relative to a pinned location in text, or you can place them inline so the item functions like a character in the text. We'll look at floating in another movie, but for now let's just focus on pinning inline. And you can pin just about anything. Graphics and photos, tables and other text frames, shapes and so on. I have this little flower graphic that's a linked Affinity designer file. I'll zoom in so we can see it better. And I'd like to position it to the left of this flowering period text so it flows along with that paragraph. With it positioned somewhere to the left of the paragraph, I'll select it and go up to the toolbar where I have these two buttons. The one on the left is for floating items with text, and the one on the right is for making items inline with the text. I'll click that one. And my flower is now inline. If I take the Move tool and try to drag it to the left out of the text frame, I can't do it. If I drag to the right, notice how the insertion point moves with the cursor. This is how you can move the inline item. I'll release it at the end of the line, and that's where the flower goes. I'll drag it back to the left. If I want to make an adjustment here so the graphic is vertically centered on the line of text, I can't just drag it up or down because that would move it to the previous paragraph or the next one. Instead what I need to do is access the pinning options in the Pinning panel, which I can open by choosing View, Studio, Pinning. Here I can change the scale to a percentage of the text in terms of Pointsize, Ascent, Cap Height, or X-Height. I'll choose Pointsize. And now if I select the text and change its size in the Context toolbar you can see the graphic resizes too. I'll set it back to 12 points, and I'll make the flower 200 percent of the point size. Now to adjust its vertical position. I'll leave the bottom of the graphic positioned at the baseline and set the offset to 70 percent. With borders, I can increase or decrease the spacing around the object. So for example, I can make the flower align exactly to the column by making the left border negative 50 percent. And I'll bring the text back closer to the graphic with a value of negative 30 percent on the right. If I ever want to release this so it's not an inline item, I can just click the Unpin button. And now it's just a separate object again. I'll undo that to put it back inline. And that's a look at creating inline items and working with the Pinning panel in Affinity Publisher.

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