Generating Album Pages with Visio (2)

Ken Horner, Compulatelist

(continuation of the article Generating Album Pages with Visio Part 1)

Visio also creates files that a desktop search engine can index. So if I want to find the page with the Scott #200 layout I can just search for it. It makes life a lot easier now that I’ve got over 700 pages in the ‘Library’.

The Visio program itself is an engineering type drawing program more geared to diagrams than a paint or Photoshop alternative. As you can see in the layout below, it comes with the usual drawing grid and guidelines and the tool bars and menu items one expects to see in programs of this sort today.

Visio's Layout Grid.

Visio’s most unique feature is a set of literally hundreds of pre-defined drawing items organized into stencils. The ‘Basic Shapes’ stencil is view is shown. Using a stencil you can drag and drop a particular type of object onto your drawing and then adjust its size, color, line weight, and even add text.

The tabs along the bottom of the screen show the various pages inside the overall drawing file. In this case, the file is the collection of over 40 album pages covering 1900-29 issues. Being able to keep them all together and reorganize at will is very convenient.

The following image shows an album page without the stencil in view and expanded to 200% of printing size. Zooming in on objects and aligning them precisely is a key part of Visio’s appeal, as is its ability to embed pictures and other files generated outside the program.

Magnified Image in Visio.

The dotted line vertical in the right center of the page is an alignment guideline. Visio will let you automatically snap items to the grid itself or to the guideline. You can also glue items to a guideline, and they’ll move if the line moves.

For most of my work, the snap-to-grid method works well, as does Visio’s ability to line up a series of selected objects by clicking on each one and then selecting a shape tool for aligning them.