Section 10.4. Phase 4: Edit the Titles and Captions


10.4. Phase 4: Edit the Titles and Captions

Depending on the theme you're using, iPhoto may offer you any of several kinds of text boxes that you can fill with titles, explanations , and captions:

  • The book title . This box appears on the book's cover and, if you've added one, Introduction page. When you first create a book, iPhoto proposes the album's name as the book name , but you're welcome to change it.

    A second text box, all set with slightly smaller type formatting, appears below the title. Use it for a subtitle : the date,"A Trip Down Memory Lane," "Happy Birthday Aunt Enid," "A Little Something for the Insurance Company," or whatever.

  • The introduction . Applying the Introduction-page design to a page produces a huge text block that you can fill with any introductory text you think the book needs.

  • Photo titles . In some layoutsprimarily the old, iPhoto 4 onesiPhoto can display the name of each photo. (Of the new designs, only the Folio template offers such an option.) When you first create the layout, the program labels each photo with whatever its title is.

    If you haven't already named each picture, you'll get only the internal iPhoto name of each one"IMG_0030.JPG," for example. Once the book layout has been created, though, you can edit the name only in one place: directly on the book page. See Figure 10-11 for details.

    Figure 10-11. When you first create the book layout, iPhoto inherits its initial photo name and caption text from the existing photo titles and Comments-box information. Unlike previous versions, however, iPhoto 6 doesn't link these two sources; if you change the photo's name in the Info panel, it doesn't change on the page layout. At right: A yellow, nonprinting warning sign appears if the text box is too small to display all of the comment text (or the full photo name).
  • Comments . The larger text box that appears for each photo (in some layouts) is for a caption. At the moment of the book's creation, iPhoto automatically fills in this box with any comments you've typed into the picture's Comments box at the left side of the iPhoto screen (see Section 5.10.2).

    Or, to be precise, it displays the first chunk of that text. Most layouts don't show nearly as much text as the "real" Title or Comments box does. In these cases, iPhoto has no choice but to chop off the excess, showing only the first sentence or two. A yellow, triangular exclamation point appears next to any text box with overflow of this kindyour cue to edit down the text to fit the text box on the layout (see Figure 10-11).


Tip: If iPhoto copies the photo names and comments onto the book pages and you don't want it to, click the Settings button below the book layout. Turn off "Automatically enter photo information." This option is also available in the shortcut menu that appears whenever you Control-click a blank spot on any page.

10.4.1. Editing Text

In general, editing text on the photo page is straightforward:

  • Click inside a text box to activate the insertion-point cursor, so you can begin typing. Zoom in on the page (using the size slider at lower right) and scroll it, if necessary, so that the type is large enough to see and edit. Click outside a text boxon another part of the page, for exampleto finish the editing.

  • You can select text and then use the Edit menu's Cut, Copy, and Paste commands to transfer text from box to box.

  • You can also move selected text within a text box by dragging it and dropping it. The trick is to hold down the mouse button for a moment before dragging. Add the Option key to make a copy of the selected text instead of moving it.

  • Double-click a word, or triple-click a paragraph, to neatly highlight it.

  • Press Control-right arrow or Control-left arrow to make the insertion point jump to the beginning or end of the line.

    Figure 10-12. Top: Click the Settings button to open the master fonts list for your photo book.
    Bottom: iPhoto 6 gives you much, much more control over the typography of your book than did previous versions. You can choose a font, a style (like bold or italic), and a size (in points) from these pop-up menus . Of course, you're affecting every similar element in the entire book (every photo title, for example) at once, but that's actually a handy way to ensure consistency.
    This is also where you can hide the page numbers .
  • To make typographically proper quotation marks (curly like "this" instead of like "this"), press Option-[ and Shift-Option-[, respectively. And to make a true long dashlike this, instead of two hyphenspress Shift-Option-hyphen.

10.4.2. Formatting Text

iPhoto offers tremendous control over the fonts, sizes, colors, and styles of the text in your book. Here's a summary of your typographical freedom:

  • Standard typefaces . To choose the basic font for each category of text boxbook title, photo name, caption, or whateverthroughout the entire book, click the Settings button at the bottom of the window. (If the iPhoto window is very narrow, the Settings command may be hiding in the >> menu at the lower-right corner of the window.)

    UP TO SPEED
    The Heartbreak of the Yellow Exclamation Point

    As you work on your book design, you may encounter the dreaded yellow-triangle-exclamation-point like the one shown here. It appears everywhere you want to be: on the corresponding page thumbnail, on the page display, on the page preview (which appears when you click Preview), and so on.

    If you actually try to order the book without first eliminating the yellow triangles , you even get a warning in the form of a dialog box.

    Sometimes the problem is that you've tried to put too much text into a text box. So no big deal; just edit it down.

    But if the triangle appears on a photo, you have a more worrisome problem: At least one of your photos doesn't have enough resolution (enough pixels) to reproduce well in the finished book. If you ignore the warning and continue with the ordering process, you're likely to be disappointed by the blotchy, grainy result in the finished book.

    You may remember from Chapter 1 that the resolution of your digital camera is relatively irrelevant if you'll only be showing your pictures onscreen. It's when you try to print them that you need all the megapixels you can getlike now .

    The easiest solution is to shrink the photo on its page. And the easiest way to do that is to increase the number of pictures on that page. Or, if your page design has places that hold both large and small photos, you can drag the problem photo onto one of the smaller photos, swapping the large and small positions .

    Decreasing a picture's size squeezes its pixels closer together, improving the dots-per-inch shortage that iPhoto is so boldly warning you about.

    If even those dramatic steps don't eliminate the yellow warning emblems, try to remember if you ever cropped the photo in question. If so, your last chance is to use the Photos Revert To Original command (Section 6.18.1.2). Doing so will undo any cropping you did to the photo, which may have jettisoned a lot of pixels that you now need. (If Revert To Original is dimmed, then you never performed any cropping, and this last resort is worthless.)

    Finally, if nothing has worked so far, your only options are to eliminate the photo from your book, or to order the book anyway.


    You get the dialog box shown in Figure 10-12, where you can make your selections.

  • Font exceptions, text colors . If you want to override the standard typeface for a certain text box, you can. Choose Edit Fonts Show Fonts ( -T); the standard Mac OS X Fonts panel appears. Here, you have complete access to all of your Mac's fonts. You can choose special text effects, shadowing, and even colors for individual text selections. Yes, the bright, multicolored result might look a little bit like it was designed by Barney the Dinosaur, but the Color option is worth keeping in mind when you're preparing books describing, say, someone's fourth birthday party.

  • Character formatting . If you select some words and then Control-click (right-click) them, a shortcut menu appears. It offers Bold, Italic, and Underline choices, which iPhoto will apply to the highlighted text. (The Edit Fonts menu also works, but it offers only Bold and Italic.)

Figure 10-13. Control-click any word that's underlined with a red, dotted line. If the resulting shortcut menu contains the correct spelling, choose it. Otherwise, if the word in your text box is fine as it is, click either Ignore Spelling ("Stop underlining this, iPhoto. It's a word I want spelled this way, so let's go on.") or Learn Spelling ("This is a name or word that not only is correctly spelled, but I may use again. Add it to my Mac OS X dictionary so you'll never flag it again.").


Tip: Can't seem to get the size, placement, or variety of type that you want? Then the heck with iPhoto and its straitjacketed text boxesyou can use whatever type you want.All you have to do is jump into a graphics program, like Photoshop Elements, AppleWorks, or GraphicConverter. Create a graphic document that's 1350 x 1800 pixels, with a resolution of 150 dots per inch. Now fill it with text, using the graphic software's text tools. You have complete freedom of fonts and placement.Finally, bring this graphic into iPhoto. Use it as a single "photo" on the page where you want the text to appear. It's crude and crazy, but it works!

10.4.3. Check Your Spelling

Taking the time to perfect your book's text is extremely important. A misspelling or typo you make here may haunt you (and amuse the book's recipient) forever.

As in a word processor, you can ask iPhoto to check your spelling in several ways:

  • Check a single word or selection . Highlight a word, or several, and then choose Edit Spelling Check Spelling ( -semicolon). If the word is misspelled in iPhoto's opinion, a red, dotted line appears under the word. Proceed as shown in Figure 10-13.

  • Check a whole text block . Click inside a title or comment box and then choose Edit Spelling Spelling ( - colon ). The standard Mac OS X Spelling dialog box appears.

  • Check as you type . The trouble with the spelling commands described here is that they operate on only a single, tiny text block at a time. To check your entire photo book, you must click inside each title or caption and invoke the spelling command again. There's no way to have iPhoto sweep through your entire book at once.

    Your eyes might widen in excitement, therefore, when you spot the Edit Spelling Check Spelling As You Type command. It makes iPhoto flag words it doesnt recognize as you type them .

    Sure enough, when this option is turned on, whenever you type a word not in iPhoto's dictionary, iPhoto adds a colorful dashed underline. (Technically, it underlines any word not in the Mac OS X dictionary, since you're actually using the standard Mac OS X spelling checkerthe same one that watches over you in Mac OS X's Mail program, for example.)

    To correct a misspelling that iPhoto has found in this way, Control-click it (or right-click). A shortcut menu appears. Now proceed as shown in Figure 10-13.

10.4.4. Listen to Your Book

Unfortunately, even a spell checker won't find missing words, inadvertently repeated words, or awkward writing. For those situations, what you really want is for iPhoto to read your captions aloud to you.

No problem: Just highlight some text by dragging through it, and then Control-click (or right-click) the highlighted area. As shown in Figure 10-12, a shortcut menu appears, containing the Speech submenu. From it, you can choose Start Speaking and Stop Speaking, which makes iPhoto start and stop reading the selected text aloud. It uses whatever voice you've selected in Mac OS X's System Preferences Speech control panel.




iPhoto 6
iPhoto 6: The Missing Manual
ISBN: 059652725X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 183

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