Computer-Printed Journaling Basics

When computer printing emerged as a popular trend in scrapbooking it changed the look of scrapbooks everywhere. Even now, the use of printers in scrapbooking has expanded in so many ways. For those new to computer-printed journaling, the options can be daunting so let’s look at some of the basics of printing journaling.

Make a date with your word-processing program. First, sit down at your computer with a word-processing program like Microsoft Word and spend some time becoming familiar with its features.

Some tasks that are helpful to learn are how to:

• Change the margins in the document.
• Create text boxes to overlap text or hold a place for your photographs and wrap your journaling around them.
• Switch fonts and change the font sizes.

Instructions on how to do many of these things are found in your word-processing program’s manual or in the program’s “Help” menu.

Experiment with different fonts, font sizes and line spacing. Once you are familiar with the various formatting options, it’s time to get creative.

Start with changing the fonts and sizes. Each variation will create a unique style and look for your titles or journaling. Some fonts work best as titles and some are better for journaling. Test several fonts and change the size of the text to find the right combination for your page.

Next, you can experiment with line spacing options. Try setting the line spacing to different amounts in a section of text. Increasing the line spacing will increase the amount of space between lines and often can make your text much more legible and stylish.

Here is a block of text with no line spacing:

Here is the same text with the line spacing doubled:

Notice the difference?

Try changing the text alignment. The default setting in most word-processing programs is left-aligned text. Give center-alignment and even right-alignment options a try as well when you’re formatting the text for your layouts. A fourth alignment option is to “justify” the text, which makes the text stretch from one margin to the other with a straight edge on each side.

Change the orientation to landscape. You can print journaling up to 8.5” wide on an 8.5” x 11” piece of paper in the default portrait mode. Often that’s plenty of space. Sometimes, though, you may want to have the printing on the longer side of the paper. This is when landscape orientation comes in handy.

To use landscape orientation, go to the Page Setup section in your word processing program (usually found under the “File” menu in your toolbar) and change the page orientation to landscape. Now, you have a much wider (up to 14” when set to legal-sized paper) area to use for your journaling or titles. This is especially handy when you want to print a title across the top or bottom of a 12” x 12” layout.

Get to know your printer. Now that you have text formatting down pat, it’s time to make yourself familiar with how your printer works and what it is capable of doing. Here are a few tests you can do to find out these capabilities:

• Print a block of text on a few different practice sheets of paper to help you learn which side your printer prints on relative to how you put the paper in the machine. Will it print face up or face down? During this test, be sure to also try printing in landscape mode to see on which end of the paper the text prints when it’s set to a different orientation.


• Most printers won’t print from edge to edge, so you’ll want to make yourself aware of what the printer’s widest margins are. To do this, move the margins in your word-processing program to the edge of the paper with words typed across the whole page. Print the document and learn how far your printer is capable of printing.


• Finally, find out what sizes of paper fit into your printer. Will it take legal-sized paper? Is 8 ½” as wide as it will accept, or can you fit a wider sheet? I recently bought a new printer and was sad to discover it only accepted 8 ½” wide instead of the 10 inches I had been accustomed to on my old printer.

Don’t feel limited in your ability to use your computer for journaling and design. Dive in and get familiar with your word-processing program and printer. Once you know the basics, you can have fun trying different styles of formatting and printing for your titles and journaling.

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