Layout Week
Timothy Monteath 
Hello!
Welcome to IM946 week 6!
This week we are going to be thinking about layout.
Last week was quite R heavy, so this week are not going to be doing any coding as promised!
If you are interested in how to work with layouts in R however I would suggest having a look at some of the uses of par() in last weeks class. You might also find it useful to use the canvas_grid() function from the baselines library which produces a grid you can use for setting precise locations on your plotting canvas.
Inkscape
“Inkscape is a Free and open source vector graphics editor for GNU/Linux, Windows and macOS. It offers a rich set of features and is widely used for both artistic and technical illustrations such as cartoons, clip art, logos, typography, diagramming and flowcharting. It uses vector graphics to allow for sharp printouts and renderings at unlimited resolution and is not bound to a fixed number of pixels like raster graphics. Inkscape uses the standardized SVG file format as its main format, which is supported by many other applications including web browsers.”
Please download and install Inkscape.
Setting up a grid
When you open Inkscape it will look something like this.
We want to select Print > A3 for a fresh A3 canvas to work with. You can, of course select different size canvases, or set your own for different projects.
Once Inkscape is open, it will look something like this.
If you have used any similar software for drawing or photo manipulation before then this will look somewhat familiar.
Before we do anything else we are going to set up a grid layout for our canvas. To do this we need to File > Document Properties either in the menu bar or clicking on these buttons below.
This will bring up a popup window where we want to select the Grids tab and then we want to click on the Rectangular button twice to add two rectangular grids.
Having done this it should look like this.
Calculating our grid
The size of an A3 page (portrait) is 297 mm x 420 mm and we need to use these numbers to calculate our layout grid.
Firstly we need to decide how many columns and rows we want, for todays example we going for a 5x8. We are going to have a 10mm gutter and 10mm alleys.
To calculate our X spacing we need to subtract our the size of our gutter (only one side) from the overall width of our page, which leaves us with 297-10=287 mm which we divide by our number of columns 287/5. This gives us our Spacing X = 57.5.
We do the same for our Y spacing 420-10=410 and then 410/8=51.25.
We enter both of these numbers for both grids and then add in a 10mm origin to x and y for grid2 so that we include the gutter and alley between the two grids.
Our canvas should then look like this, with a set of guides we can use to experiment with layouts and guide how we are adding new elements to our page.
Making our layouts digital
New we have our grid setup, we can play around with different layouts. The videos below will cover the basics of how we can do this.
Firstly we can sketch out different layout ideas using the rectangle tool.
Now we have a layout sketched out we can use layers to bring in our data and see what this looks like.
Download the data examples here.
Open this up in Inkscape and copy in whichever example you want for your layout.
Before we copy our examples across I am going to make use of layers. First, I click on the little lock icon. This means we can still see, but no longer interact with anything in this layer - which stops us moving our layout squares around by accident. Then I create a new layer which we are going to copy and paste our example into.
Next we use the text tool and the Lorem Ipsum tool to add in some example text to fill out what this might look in our final visualization. This is also a great way to find out how many words you can fit into your layout.
Finally we can turn off our layout layer with the little eye icon. This means we can no longer see the layer, and it won’t be exported, but it is not deleted and we can re-enable it later if we wanted. Then we turn of the guides we set using the menu to see what our final layout will look like. Then we save and then export it as a PDF. In the export settings we select page so that we export the full A3 page, and set our background transparency to white.
And you can download this PDF to see what the final output looks like.
Over to you!
Try creating your own layouts using Inkscape and upload them to the Miro Board
p.s. if you want to learn more about inkscape this video is a good introduction to lots of basic functionality.