Notes on Freehand placement of images on the page

To gain maximum control over the printed page, you may select "Freehand" placement at any time.  The Freehand option "unlocks" the positioning on every image in your document so that they may be placed (dragged) manually.  The most efficient means for manually placing images in a (large) document is to first set the image positioning option to "Center".  You can then add as many images at any size(s) you like.  The document will be created with images centered on the page.  You can then "switch" to manual by selecting freehand mode and "tweak" the locations/sizes any way you like.  The simplest steps to perform this are the following.

• Select "Page", "Image Placement" and "Center" from the top menu bar.
• Select size(s) and add the images to the queue.
• Click "Page", "Edit Page" from the top menu bar to open the page editor and drag to place and/or size the images.  To do this, after the page editor opens, simply select the image you would like to move by left clicking on that image. Then you can drag from anywhere in the center part of the image to move the image around on the page.  You may also drag to size the image in the typical fashion using the corners of the image.

Although the above is the simplest method, Qimage offers other features as well.  For example, you can select the "Freehand" positioning option before adding images.  You can then drag images from the thumbnail display directly to the location you want on the small preview page to the right.  The image(s) will be dropped so that the upper left corner is located at the mouse pointer.

The following is a summary of functions that apply to "Freehand" operation:

• Add - to add images to the page while in freehand mode, simply go to the page in question and drag the image from the thumbnails viewer directly to the page.  Note that the image will be dropped at the mouse pointer.  If you want to move the image after initial placement, you must click the "Edit" button since the preview page on the main screen is "write once" and is really meant for the rough draft.
• Add a new page - to create a new page while in freehand mode, simply click the right arrow under the page preview until you reach the last page, or drop the page list down and select the last page.  The next time you click the right arrow, Qimage will ask you if you would like to create a new page.
• "Bring to front" - using freehand mode allows you to place images (all or partly) on top of other images.  An image's position in the queue is what causes it to be "in front of" or "behind" other images.  The easiest way to think of this is that images are placed on the page in the order that they appear in the queue.  Images that are later in the queue will be placed on top of earlier images.  You can use the cut/paste option in the editor to cut an image and replace it in the queue "before" or "after" any other image.  When you paste the image, the paste operation remembers exactly where the image was when you cut it, and will place it back in the same location.  This makes it easier to change the overlap without changing the location on the page.
• Switching to freehand mode - There are two ways to switch from center, compact, etc. directly to freehand mode.  One way is to click "Page", "Image Placement" on the top menu bar of the main window and select "Freehand".  The other is to drag an image while in the page editor.  Dragging the image will automatically prompt you to go to freehand mode (unless you are already in freehand mode).  Note that when you switch from any of the automatic modes to "Freehand", your images will stay at the same locations until you change them.