Default Margins and also book design

[William Overington]

One of the first things that I noticed when starting to use Affinity Publisher is that when starting an A4 document the default margins are much larger than are the default margins when starting an A4 document in PagePlus.

Is there any particular reason for this please?

I appreciate that one can adjust the margins in both Affinity Publisher and in PagePlus.

While thinking about writing this post I remembered something that I heard back in the 1960s and that is that for good book design one should arrange that the top left corner of the text of a page lies upon the upper left to lower right diagonal (the diagonal not being printed, just a construction line when designing the page). Has anyone here ever heard of that please?

William

 

[MikeW]

40 minutes ago, William Overington said:

One of the first things that I noticed when starting to use Affinity Publisher is that when starting an A4 document the default margins are much larger than are the default margins when starting an A4 document in PagePlus.

Is there any particular reason for this please?

I appreciate that one can adjust the margins in both Affinity Publisher and in PagePlus.

While thinking about writing this post I remembered something that I heard back in the 1960s and that is that for good book design one should arrange that the top left corner of the text of a page lies upon the upper left to lower right diagonal (the diagonal not being printed, just a construction line when designing the page). Has anyone here ever heard of that please?

William

Margins are a sticky setting. So whatever you set is there for the next new publication. You can also set them, then synchronize defaults (probably, I haven't tried it). You can also make blank files to use as templates set up how you like them. I dunno if saving a page preset works with things like margins. Probably/Maybe.

Your musing...Sure. It works for some books, not so much for others and chapter starts (and other types of pages in non-novel books) usually break that concept.

So grab some books off your shelf and a ruler. Start looking at those books and how often that concept works out.

[Old Bruce]

50 minutes ago, William Overington said:

While thinking about writing this post I remembered something that I heard back in the 1960s and that is that for good book design one should arrange that the top left corner of the text of a page lies upon the upper left to lower right diagonal (the diagonal not being printed, just a construction line when designing the page). Has anyone here ever heard of that please?

I have heard that and many other things. Read several design books and you'll have more rules that only sometimes work. What looks good usually is good.

Change the font and suddenly the page is no longer appealing to the eye.

[jayesjay]

William, these are the results of a couple of Google searches- "book page design," " where  do I start the text x on a page, etc"  I did not find anything about text blocks staring on a diagonal. However, see the note below - doing that is more pleasing aesthetically.

 

https://99designs.co.uk/blog/tips/book-layout-design-typesetting-tips/

 

https://www.tckpublishing.com/6-keys-for-book-page-layout/

 

https://libguides.lib.msu.edu/c.php?g=97090&p=908734

 

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Basic_Book_Design/Headers,_Footers,_and_Page_Numbers

 

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Basic_Book_Design/Margins

 

Using the recommendation in the  last guide above, I tried a sample 6x9 inch page (no text, just lines) with the defined equal all round margins. Then it is clear that the top left point of the text block would lie above the diagonal.  However, bringing the text start point to lie on the diagonal increases the top margin, but is more aesthetically pleasant. The bottom right corner also would rise, with a similar result.

 

I haven't read the whole thread; I just looked up the topic as far as I got. If someone else has explained further, great!