Editing with CD Cover (BeLight Software)

Always remember that except for the photos it will print quite a bit darker than it looks, probably twice as dark. Go very pale. When putting typing on wherever possible make the background very opaque, a light colour, and use black or very dark type. To get the light colours I suggest click the photo icon on the colour box, the one just to the left of the crayons. You'll see that on the left that goes all the way to white.

Note also that while drop shadows look fantastic on the screen they tend to work much less well on the printed page - they almost look like dirty grey marks or faults with the printer. Sorry, but there it is. Try a different shade of drop shadow. Try white even.

When cropping pictures, open them with Preview and hold Shift down while drawing the crop box. This will force it to stay square.

Avoid large expanses of black in pictures as the printer will not cope - you'll get bars across them. I know it may look great on the screen, but printing it is another thing. Sorry but there it is.

To do a screen dump, press <cmd>-<shift>-4 and drag across what you want to capture - this will put the screen dump as a PNG on the desktop.

Printing booklets using CD Cover

I suggest use paper type CD Cover - A4; hopefully this should stop the front and back being slightly out of alignment with each other. You can use A4 plain but you've have alignment problems.

You'll need to print them a double page at a time and work out yourself which pages go with which. For a twelve page booklet I'm afraid that will be a bit of a nightmare. Try and decide how many pages you want to begin with, or it will be awkward rearranging the pages later.

Do NOT turn the page round between prints. Pull it out and put it straight back in the tray again (feet first).

Four pages:
4-1 with 2-3 printed on the back

Eight pages - try:
8-1 with 2-7 printed on the back
6-3 with 4-5 

Twelve pages - try:
12-1 with 2-11 printed on the back
10-3 with 4-9
8-5 with 6-7

For the back cover insert using CD Cover I suggest change the paper type (drop down) to A4 plain. Drag both front and back to the page. Print it. It will come out head first. Take it out and put it HEAD FIRST into the paper tray - don't turn it over. Print again but this time drag the elements to the page the other way round, that is with the other one at the top. If you get this wrong, the back will be upside down.