Tips on centering graphics elements in PageMaker

JAKARTA (JP): Here's a quick and dirty yet powerful way of making sure you place graphics elements, such as cliparts and scanned images, exactly in the middle of two margins. The key of this method is to treat the graphics elements as text.

First, decide where you want to place these elements. Select the Text tool from the Tools box and place the text insertion cursor exactly to the left of where you want the first element to appear. Click once.

After that, use the Place command -- found under the File menu item -- to retrieve the element. A dialog box will appear, and you can select the file that contains that element.

Click on OK, and in a few moments -- depending on the speed of your PC and the size and format of the file -- the element will appear on the page. If your default alignment is Left, the element will first appear in the left.

All you have to do now is highlight it, using the Shift and End keys. Once it is highlighted, you can press Ctrl-Shift-C to center it. Voila! The element will appear exactly in the center of the margins. Make sure that the edges of the windowshade, i.e., PageMaker's container for text elements, snap to the margin guides.

If you want to place multiple copies of the same element, just follow these steps: With the Selection tool, select the element. Press Ctrl-Ins to place a copy of it in Windows Clipboard. Then select the Text tool and click on the text windowshade. Press End to move the cursor past all existing elements, then press Shift- Ins as many times as necessary to paste copies from the Clipboard content. You can add space between copies, and the result may look as the ones on the bottom of the illustration.

You can also use the same method to place the elements vertically centered. All you have to do is rotate the text windowshade -90 degrees using PageMaker 5.0's Control Panel. In PageMaker 4.0, you have to use the Text Rotation command, found under the Element menu item.

Once the text windowshade is rotated, you select the element only and rotate it again 90 degree to reposition it. You can see the result on the left of the illustration. Unfortunately, this last step is not available in PageMaker 4.0.

In the accompanying illustration, I have placed several clipart graphics from Winword 6.0's collection. Notice the text windowshades and how the elements are truly centered within them. Even when you re-scale the graphics elements, they will remain centered. That's the beauty of this method, which is also known as the Inline Graphics method.

-- Zatni Arbi