Arranging boxes, rulers, guides, the page overlay and page stamps

Most of a Reportforge template flows: boxes follow one another down the page, and you move them by reordering. Some content is positioned instead. You place it at a set distance from an edge:

• the children of a frame, for slips, labels and forms;
• a page template's background, drawn behind everything (a letterhead);
• a page template's overlay, drawn above everything (a "Draft" or "Copy" stamp);
• the children of a page stamp, drawn on the page where a row or item lands (a "Paid" stamp on the page of a paid invoice).

These boxes have move and resize handles on the canvas. They snap to the margins, their frame, other boxes, a grid and your guides. The arrow keys nudge them, by one step of the document's unit (a millimetre or a point), or by ten with Shift. The tools on this page work on them.

Align, distribute and match size

Select the boxes in the outline or on the canvas (Shift adds to the selection). Then use the arrange buttons in the toolbar over the selection, or the Arrange submenu of the canvas's or outline's menu. A tool that doesn't apply to the selection says why in its tooltip and in the menu.

Tool	Does
Align left edges, centres, right edges	Lines the boxes up horizontally on the selection's bounds. With one box selected, it aligns to its frame (or to the page, in a background, overlay or page stamp).
Align top edges, middles, bottom edges	The same, vertically.
Distribute horizontally, vertically	Three or more boxes: the first and the last stay, and the others move so the gaps between them are equal.
Match width, height	Two or more boxes take the size of the box you picked last.

Each tool is one undo step, however many boxes it moves. It writes what a drag would: a box placed from the right keeps right, and lengths keep their unit, so 12mm stays in millimetres. The boxes have to be on the same page.

Rulers

Press Ctrl+R (⌘R on macOS), or Rulers in the View group of the top strip's More menu, to show rulers along every page. They count from the page's top-left corner in the document's unit. While you move or resize a box, they count from its frame instead, and show where the box is. The browser remembers whether the rulers are on.

Guides

Guides are lines you place to line things up with.

• Add one: drag out of the top ruler for a horizontal guide, or out of the left ruler for a vertical one, and let go on the page. While you drag, it shows where it is (45mm), rounded to the unit's step.
• Move one: drag it.
• Remove one: drag it off the page, or right-click it and choose Delete the guide. Delete every guide of the page template, in a guide's menu or a page's menu, removes all of a template's guides.

Positioned boxes snap to guides as you drag them.

Guides belong to a page template, so every page that uses the template shows them. They are saved with the draft, versioned with it, and everyone who edits the template sees the same guides. Each guide change is one undo step. In the document, they are kept in meta.designer.guides, which engines ignore (RFML §19.1):

"meta": { "title": "Invoice", "designer": { "guides": { "a4": [{ "x": "20mm" }, { "y": "45mm" }] } } }

The page overlay

A page template's overlay is drawn on every page, above the content, the header and the footer (RFML §9.1). Use it for stamps such as "Draft", "Copy" or "Void", or for a page number that sits over the content.

1. Open the Pages tab. In the page template editor, the Overlay section works like the Background section: + Text adds a text at the corner of the margins, and you type its text there. A page's menu has Edit the overlay too.
2. Select the text and move it on the canvas, or set its position and style in the inspector. Its handles stay while the page template editor is open.
3. To show a stamp only sometimes, give it a Show if condition in the inspector. A stamp that shows outside production could depend on a parameter: params.environment != 'prod'. Page values such as page.number work in its text, but not in its condition.

A variant (first, left, right, last or blank pages) can have an overlay of its own instead of the template's, or none: Own copy gives the variant a copy to change.

How each output draws it:

Output	The overlay
PDF	Drawn last and tagged as an artifact (Pagination, Watermark), so screen readers skip it. PDF/A and PDF/UA documents stay valid.
HTML (paged), the viewer, the canvas	A layer above the page.
Word	A drawing in front of the text, anchored in the page's header, as Word does watermarks. Word repeats a header unchanged, so the overlay is the same on every page the header serves (page fields still count).
Excel, HTML (flow)	Left out, since they have no pages. A warning says so when the overlay has something to show.

RFML 0.2

Overlays and guides are new in RFML 0.2. A template that uses neither stays "rfml": "0.1". The edit that adds the first overlay text or the first guide sets "rfml": "0.2" in the same undo step, and undoing it takes the version back. An engine that reads only RFML 0.1 refuses a template that uses them.

Page stamps

The overlay is the same on every page: its Show if can read parameters and the data, but not the row a page holds. A page stamp can. It sits in the flow, in a table's cell or a region's item, and draws its children at a fixed place on the page where that row or item lands (RFML §6.13). Use it for a "Paid" stamp on the page of a paid invoice, or a "Fragile" mark on a parcel's label.

1. Insert a Page stamp where the row is: in a column's cell, a region's item, a group's header, or a component. It holds positioned children, as a frame does.
2. Give the stamp a Show if that reads the row, such as row.status == 'paid'.
3. Select its text on the canvas and move it, or set its position in the inspector. Positions count from the page's corner. Moving one instance moves them all, since they are one node.

How it behaves:

• It takes no space and never moves anything in the flow. A stamp at the top of a row goes with the row, so it lands on the page where the row starts.
• On each page only the first instance of a stamp draws, so ten paid invoices on a page give one "Paid" stamp. Two different stamps both draw, ordered by their z-index.
• It is drawn above the content and the footer, and below the overlay.
• In a repeated table header, it draws again on every page the header repeats on.
• Screen readers read it with the row it belongs to. Tick Decorative for a stamp that only decorates: it is then left out of the structure of a tagged PDF, and hidden in HTML.
• A click on a stamp's text selects it, even over content. Alt+click or the canvas menu's Select submenu reaches what is underneath. In the outline, the stamp sits under the cell or item that holds it.
• When the sample data never shows the stamp, the inspector says so. You can still type its position, and when another page shows it, the inspector takes you there.

A page stamp can't be in a page template's header, footer, background or overlay, in a frame, or in another stamp, and it can't hold footnotes. The checker says so.

How each output draws it:

Output	A page stamp
PDF, PNG, HTML (paged), the viewer, the canvas	On the page where it lands, as content, or as an artifact when decorative.
Word	A drawing in front of the text, in a paragraph of its own where the stamp sits, so Word draws it on the page where it puts the row. Word breaks pages its own way, and draws every instance it finds, so only the instances the PDF draws are written. In a table cell, Word places the drawing from the cell's corner, so there it is placed from the cell (an info diagnostic says so).
HTML (flow)	Shown where it sits, without its position, with an info diagnostic.
Excel	Left out, with an info diagnostic.

Page stamps are new in RFML 0.2, so a template that uses one declares "rfml": "0.2".

Selecting a box behind another

A click on the canvas selects the topmost box under the pointer. Sometimes that box covers the one you want: an overlay's stamp over the logo, a page stamp over a table, a frame child over a text, or a large image. Two ways get past it:

• Alt+click (⌥-click on macOS) selects the box under the selected one, where you click. Click again with Alt to go further down. After the bottom box, it wraps round to the top. When none of the boxes there is selected, Alt+click selects the one under the top box, since a plain click gives you the top one. On a table, Alt+click steps past the cells like any box, rather than picking a cell.
• The Select submenu of the canvas's menu lists every box under the pointer, top first, and checks the selected one. Pick one to select it. Right-click to open it. From the keyboard, Shift+F10 or the Menu key lists the boxes under the middle of the box with the keyboard. It shows only when more than one box is there.

Select the box behind in the command palette does what Alt+click does, where you last clicked on the canvas, or else in the middle of the selection. The outline, and the canvas's arrow keys, reach every box too, covered or not.

A page's header, footer, background and overlay are not boxes to select themselves, only what they hold. A click where they hold nothing, such as the margin beside the footer, clears the selection, and neither Alt+click nor the arrow keys stop on them. The Pages panel edits the page template.