What the editor is doing while you type

The designs on this site are drawn by a small layout engine rather than saved as pictures of pages. It measures every string with the real advance widths of the fonts a PDF actually uses, works out where each line breaks, and writes the PDF by hand at the size the printer specified. The editor is that same engine, running in your browser, reading a recording of what the page is made of.

That is why nothing here can be dragged. A headline that gets longer comes down in size until it fits the columns it was given; a story re-pours down its columns and stops at the foot of the last one rather than running on; a picture is cropped to its box the way the page would crop it. You are editing the newspaper, not a drawing of one, and the file you download is written by the same code that drew what you were looking at.

Pictures

Use your own by choosing a picture box and picking a file. It is re-encoded before it goes anywhere near the PDF, because a phone photograph can carry a colour profile or a rotation flag that a press will not read the way your screen does. It never leaves your browser.

The pictures supplied with the templates are all public domain or CC0. That is a deliberate limit rather than a shortage: these files get printed and sold, and a photograph that wants crediting cannot survive somebody deleting the caption. Each one is listed with its source on its own design page.

Your work is kept in this browser

There is no account and nothing is uploaded. Edits are held in this browser's own storage and stay there, per design, until you clear them or press Start again. That also means they do not follow you to another computer, so download the file when you are happy with it.

What you get

The PDF holds both pages at the full sheet size, with the trim marked where the printer asks for it and bleed included on the formats that take it. The SVG holds one page with its pictures inside the file, and opens in Illustrator, Affinity Designer, Inkscape or Canva if you want to take the layout further than this page allows.