Book design
Shape a visual system that can survive a whole volume.
Book Design keeps trim, typography, page parts, chapter openings, running elements, and numbering in one place so a change remains deliberate instead of becoming a manual cleanup project.
Start with geometry
Open Book → Page settings to choose trim size, orientation, margins, gutter, bleed, and mirrored page behavior. The page is the physical contract of the book: set it before judging typography.
Create a reusable theme
Book themes hold the details readers feel even when they cannot name them: body face, size, line height, paragraph spacing, first-line indent, alignment, chapter heading treatment, and title hierarchy.
- Open Book → Book style.
- Choose a built-in starting point or create a named custom theme.
- Adjust body and heading styles in the live preview.
- Apply it to the whole book or a selected section, depending on the intended exception.
Page Parts, headers, and footers
Page Parts are reusable templates for opening pages, ornaments, headers, footers, and other repeated furniture. Running elements can use the book title, section title, page number, or custom text. Suppression rules let a chapter opening stay quiet without breaking the rest of the running system.
Numbering is a sequence, not decoration
Set front matter to roman numerals when appropriate, choose the body start number, and decide whether chapter or section transitions restart numbering. Use Page Proof to verify the actual sequence rather than trusting a single sample page.
Change one system at a time—geometry, typography, running elements, then numbering. It makes unexpected pagination changes much easier to explain.