Cacidi Extreme CC Manual

What is a Page Design?

A page design is an outline of the selected page, i.e. the layout of the page is created by adding one or more Item Designs, loose ads and empty spaces in the available grid tiles on the page.

Create a new Page Design
Specify the number of tiles on your page in the page grid by setting the desired number of columns and rows for the page. Then, select New Page Design in the Page Design pop-up menu. Extreme will subsequently add the selected number of tiles to fit the number of rows and columns on the page. Each tile created will be painted green with the text Skip Item shown on each field. A green tile signifies, that this tile will be skipped, unless an Item Design is applied to it, in which case the tile will turn blue, meaning that an Item Design as been assigned to this particular tile. A tile can have one of the following three properties assigned to it:

Blue: Standard Item Design

Pink: Ad or loose Ad

Green: Skip Item

Assign an Item Design to a Page Design
Select one or more green tiles via the Adobe InDesign selection tool (black arrow) in the Tools palette. Next, go to the Select an Item Design pop-up menu and select one of your standard Item Designs. The tiles name will change from Skip Item to the name of the Item Design you selected and the color will change from green to blue. If you want to change an already assigned Item Design in a blue box, select the box and choose another Item Design from the popup menu.
Note, that there is no limit on how many times you can use the same Item Design in a Page Design. Item Designs are just like a graphical template and will be dublicated for each assigned tile.

Assign a Loose Ad to a Page Design
Select one or more tiles using the Adobe InDesign selection tool (black arrow) in the Tools palette. Next, select the Ad feature in the Select an Item Design pop-up menu in the Extreme palette. A dialog will now appear. It allows you to select an Ad as an image or text file (or virtually every file type that can be placed within InDesign). If you have selected multiple tiles, the dialog will appear multiple times allowing you to select an Ad for each selected tile. The field's name will change from Skip Item to Ad- plus the path and name you have specified for the selected Ad. The field's size when you save it will also be the size in which the ads will be placed. If you want your Ad to cover two rows, drag the field until it has the desired size. The field's color will change to pink.

Skip a Tile in a Page Design
You will frequently come across Item Designs that cover more than one row or column. Therefore it is important that you allocate enough space for these. You have two options in terms of skipping a tile: you can either delete the tile completely or, select the tile and use the Skip Item feature in the Select an Item Design pop-up menu. The field will now be skipped and the field's name will change to Skip Item and have the color green.

Save a Page Design
Click on the Save button to the right of the Select a Page Design pop-up menu. Cacidi Extreme will now detect your page design and allow you to save your whole Page Design. Save the Page Design in the Design folder you chose in the settings for your project. Give the page design an appropriate name, e.g. by specifying the tile and document size (6x4 Tabloid).

The Tile numbers
Each tile created when you create a new Page Design will be numbered from 1 to the number of tiles on the grid. When producing a Page Design using the Create method in Extreme, data entries will be added to Item Designs assigned to the tiles based on these numbers. Thus, data entry number 1 will be merged into the Item Design assigned to the tile with the lowest number which also has an Item Design assigned to it (it's color is blue). The second data entry will be merged into the second lowest Item Design-assigned tile on the Page Design and so on. If a tile is skipped (it's green or deleted) or if has an Ad assigned to it, the next data entry will be merged into the following Item Design assigned to whatever tile comes next in these numbers.
So, if for example, tile #1 as assigned to an Ad and tile #2 is skipped, the first data entry will be placed within the Item Design placed in tile #3.
By default, the Tile numbers are created vertically one column at a time. To assign them vertically to the tiles, hold down the Option key on a Mac or Alt key on a Windows while selecting New Page Design from the pop-up menu.

Creating a floating Page Design
The page design tiles aren't locked by the Page Grid. You can move them around how ever you like and their position will be remembered next time you load a saved Page Design.


Leave a Reply

The Number One Plugin developer for Adobe InDesign