### Create a document

When you want to typeset and print something with iCalamus, we call the required file a document. Everything can be a document, even real documents like certificates, identity cards or bank notes. Start typesetting business letters, business cards, posters, brochures, whole books, stamps, certificates, photo books, CD covers and whatever you can imagine – with iCalamus.

You will surely have seen the dialog New document when you launched iCalamus for the first time. There you define how the document you are going to typeset should look. You can define directly how many pages the document should have and which format the pages should use. You can even set guides or guide columns for layout reasons which might help placing elements in your document later.

In iCalamus you can edit documents in a simple page view, or in a double page view at this time. For example, if you want to layout a magazine with 64 pages, it is helpful to be able to see the facing pages of the finished printed magazine correctly displayed on the screen. This is what the check boxes Double page mode and First page is right page are used for.

iCalamus offers a variety of predefined page formats in a menu. Click with the mouse on the wide horizontal bar in the Format field. Then you will see the page format menu with a really long list of pages.

Beside iCalamus documents you can also edit Photographerbook documents at this time. We will refer to them later in detail.

If this menu touches the screen border at the top or the bottom, you will see an arrow there which indicates that the list continues in the relevant direction. When you move the mouse to this arrow, the page format menu scrolls automatically downwards or upwards. At the bottom end you will find the entry User defined. When you select it with a mouse click, the page format menu closes, and you can enter your desired page format in the fields Width and Height.

But of course you do not need to scroll down the page format menu each time you want to enter your own format. It doesn't matter which page format is currently shown in the dialog. Simply click into the numeric edit fields and enter new values. The page format menu title will then automatically switch to User defined.

Have you decided which page format you would like to choose? Did you set up your desired page parameters? Then click on [OK]. The dialog closes, and you have created a new document in iCalamus which now lays in front of you in its whole (white) magnificence.