Picture Book Studio — the full guide

This is the manual — the studio is deliberately thin

What follows is the complete documentation for Picture Book Studio. The tool page itself keeps only the essentials: the page list, the canvas, the panels you touch while you work. That is a decision, not an oversight. Every line of instruction sitting next to the canvas is one more thing competing with the book you are trying to make, and the most common way a picture book project dies is that the author spends forty minutes reading instead of ten minutes laying out a page.

So the long help document that used to sit at the bottom of the studio now lives here, on its own page, with room to explain the reasoning rather than just naming the buttons. It is written for two quite different readers. The first is someone who has never opened the studio and wants to know what is about to happen. The second — and honestly the more common case — is someone who is three pages into a book, has hit a specific wall, and wants one clear answer without re-reading everything.

Read it that way. Do not start at the top and work down like a novel. Skim the section headings, jump to the one that matches your problem, and go back to the studio. Every section ends up pointing at the same place: the manual is the reference, the studio is where the work happens. If you want the shortest possible path, the first-run walkthrough in the third section is all you need to finish a book today.

The gap it fills: from "I have a story" to "I have a book"

Parents and teachers almost never lack material. There is the bedtime story you made up on Tuesday and can still remember. There is the paragraph your seven-year-old dictated about the class hamster. There is a four-line passage from the textbook that your students read aloud beautifully and that would make a lovely little book for the reading corner. Nobody in this situation is short of words.

What stops them is the translation step between text and book. The pinyin has to be added, and added correctly, because a reading book with wrong tones is worse than no book at all. The pinyin has to sit neatly above each character rather than floating wherever the word processor felt like putting it. The illustration has to fill the page without a white strip down one edge. And the whole object has to end up looking like something printed, not like a document with pictures in it.

Done the ordinary way, that is three or four pieces of software in a chain — an annotation tool, a text editor, an image editor, a layout program — and every handover between them loses something. The pinyin comes back misaligned. The illustration is the wrong aspect ratio. The page size changes. You spend an evening on plumbing and end up with something that looks improvised, which is dispiriting enough that most people never try a second book.

The studio collapses that chain into a single page: annotation, layout and PDF generation all happen in the same place, in that order. But the real design goal here is narrower than it sounds. The hard part of a layout tool is not the number of features; it is stopping the user from falling into endless fiddling. A tool that lets you place text at any coordinate on the page will absorb four hours and produce a book that looks worse than the version you had after twenty minutes. Everything below — the nine fixed positions, the presets, the live ratio handle — exists to keep you moving toward a finished book instead of polishing page one forever.

A first run you can simply follow

If you have never opened the studio, do exactly this in this order. It is aimed at a five-page book with one illustration per page, and it lands a first full draft in roughly a quarter of an hour.

1. Write the title. The book opens on a cover page. Type the title in the text box on the canvas — this is the one page where the text is meant to be short and large. Do not agonise over wording yet; titles are the easiest thing in the book to change later, and the layout around them barely moves when you do.
2. On the cover, add a one-line subtitle and upload a portrait-orientation photo. The subtitle is your byline slot: "Written by Dad, for Mia" is a perfectly good subtitle. Portrait orientation matters because the cover frame is taller than it is wide, and a landscape photo will either be cropped hard or leave gaps at the sides. If your best photo is landscape, crop it to portrait before uploading rather than fighting the frame.
3. Add a story page. Use the add-page control and pick the story page type. You now have a cover and one interior page, which is enough to see how the whole thing behaves.
4. Paste 30 to 60 characters of story text. Not more. The studio annotates as you type, so you will see pinyin appear above each character immediately, and polyphones resolve themselves from context. The 30-to-60 window is the comfortable range for a page aimed at a young reader: enough to be a real sentence or two, short enough that a child can track it.
5. Try the split layout. Change the page layout from text-only to split, so the illustration takes one band and the text takes the other. This is where the page suddenly starts looking like a page from a book, and it is the layout most of your pages should end up using. Switch between all three layouts here purely to feel the difference — nothing is locked in.
6. Adjust character size and line spacing until the page breathes. The common beginner mistake is text that is technically fine and visually suffocating: characters pressed against each other, pinyin touching the line above. Increase the line spacing first, then the character size, and stop as soon as the page looks unhurried. "Breathes" is a real criterion — you can see it.
7. Scan for mis-resolved polyphones and click to fix them. Read across the text and look for characters with more than one reading. Anything that came out wrong is corrected by clicking the character and choosing the right reading from the list. This is the one step that genuinely requires your brain and your knowledge of the story.
8. Read the whole book through, then export the PDF. Flip through every page in order rather than only the one you were editing. You are checking rhythm as much as accuracy: does a short page follow a long one well, are the illustrations spread evenly, does the ending land? When it reads well, export, and you have a book.

Where people get stuck, predictably: at step two, deciding that their photo is not good enough, and at step six, unable to stop adjusting. Push past both. A finished five-page book teaches you more about your own preferences than any amount of setup.

A five-page book normally reaches a complete first draft in about a quarter of an hour once the text and images are in front of you. Budget the rest of the evening for revisions, not for the first draft.

Choosing between the three layouts

Start from a principle rather than a preference: more layouts do not make a better book; matching the layout to the nature of the text on that page does. A page of dialogue and a page of scene-setting have different needs, and using the same layout for both is what makes amateur books feel monotonous after four spreads.

Text on its own page

Here the page is fundamentally text, with the illustration demoted to a small band along the top. It suits longer passages — a paragraph your child dictated, a whole textbook excerpt — and it is the natural choice for transitions, the "the next morning, something had changed" pages that carry the story from one scene to the next. It is also the easiest layout on the eye, because the reading task is unambiguous and nothing competes with the characters. The cost is that it is visually the flattest of the three: a book of nothing but text pages reads like a printed worksheet with a decorative strip.

Text on top of the illustration

This is the full-bleed layout: the image runs across the whole page and the text floats above it. It is the closest thing to how a commercial picture book looks, and it is best for short lines, repeated patterns ("and the bear said…"), and images with a strong emotional charge where you want the reader's eye on the picture first. The trap is legibility and trimming. Keep the text inside the safe margin, or trimming the printed sheet will clip the corners of your words. Overlay pages also work best when the text is genuinely short — a single line, or two — because a wall of text over a busy illustration is hard to read no matter how good the contrast is.

Split page

Image and text each take a band, one above the other. The ratio between them is fixed by default, but you can change it live by dragging the handle on the divider line in the preview, and the change happens immediately with the text and illustration left where they were. This is the most common layout in books for young children, and the most reliably professional-looking one, for a simple reason: the reader never has to hunt for the text. Their eye knows where the words live on every page, which matters enormously for a child still learning to read.

The practical recipe, then: default your story pages to the split layout; switch to the overlay layout for a short emotional beat where the picture should carry the moment; use the text-only layout for long passages and transitions. Mixing all three across a book reads far more professionally than one layout from cover to cover, even though it is less work to keep them uniform. A book that varies its layout looks considered; a book that does not looks generated.

Working with the illustration: position, zoom and area ratio

Illustration control is where most of the fiddling happens, so it is worth knowing exactly which of the three controls does what — they are independent, and confusing them is why a change sometimes seems to "undo" earlier work.

Dragging to reposition

You can drag the illustration directly in the preview to recompose it. Use this to move a figure to one side so there is clear space for text, or to shift a horizon line up. A dashed outline in the preview marks the illustration area, so you can see its boundaries while you drag and know when you are pushing an edge out of frame. Once the preview has focus, the arrow keys nudge the illustration, and holding Shift takes bigger steps — far more precise than dragging for a small correction.

Zoom

Zoom is handled in two places: the floating zoom bar at the bottom right of the preview (zoom in, zoom out, reset) and the zoom slider in the Content panel on the right. The range is roughly 40 to 300 per cent. The Fit setting decides what "fit" means: Fill and crop scales the image until it covers the frame completely, with no white edges — the right choice for photographs — while Show it whole keeps the entire image visible, accepting margins if the aspect ratios do not match. For a picture book, white edges are almost always a mistake, so Fill and crop is the sane default for photographic illustrations and Show it whole is for diagrams and drawings you cannot afford to trim.

Changing the image/text ratio

On a split page, drag the orange handle on the divider line to move the boundary between the illustration and the text. Here is the design point that saves the most time: changing the ratio never rescales the illustration and never changes the text size. It only changes how much of the picture is visible inside the frame. That means you can drag the divider back and forth freely while you decide whether you want the picture dominant or the words dominant, without undoing the zoom and position work you already did. Nothing is destroyed by exploring.

Reset position and zoom returns the illustration to its default framing — centred, and fitted according to the current Fit setting. Reach for it when an image has drifted so far that you have lost track of the original composition, or after swapping in a new illustration that needs a clean start. As a rule of thumb, an illustration share of 50 to 65 per cent of the page looks the steadiest; below that the picture starts to feel incidental, above it the text begins to feel squeezed.

Why overlay text gets nine fixed positions instead of free dragging

People who have used desktop design software often ask why they cannot simply drag the text anywhere on an overlay page. It is a deliberate trade-off, not a missing feature.

Free dragging sounds more flexible, but in practice it produces two problems. The first is that text ends up covering the subject of the illustration — the face, the action, the thing the child is supposed to look at — and you do not notice until the book is exported and printed, at which point the damage is on paper. On screen, over a light image, a line of text sitting across a character's face can look acceptable; in print, over a dark jacket, it reads as a defect. The second problem is subtler: every adjustment becomes trial and error. You move the text, it collides with something, you move it again, the line breaks change, and after twenty minutes of this parents and teachers have spent their patience on "it still doesn't look right" instead of on the story.

So overlay text is limited to nine safe positions inside the page margin — top, centre and bottom, in each of the three columns. Each position automatically receives a translucent backing panel, which keeps the text legible whether the artwork beneath it is dark or light. That is what makes the output reliably look like a book rather than a design accident. The constraint is the feature.

If you want a freer result, the practical route is to keep overlay text to two or three lines so it occupies little space no matter where it sits, and to use the position choices to follow the composition — text in the clear area of the image, not over its busiest region. That combination gets you a page that looks intentional without giving you a dragging handle to lose an afternoon to.

The pinyin layer and polyphone correction

Automatic annotation is what separates this studio from a generic layout tool. As you type, every character is annotated, and polyphones are resolved from context rather than from a fixed table: 乐 in 音乐 comes out as yuè, and 乐 in 快乐 comes out as lè, without you looking anything up by hand. For an adult writing a story for a child, that removes the single most tedious part of the job.

That said, automatic resolution is imperfect, and it is worth knowing exactly where it is weakest: place names, surnames, set phrases, and the difference between colloquial and literary readings. A character that is a surname will often be read as the ordinary word; a two-character place name may pick up the wrong reading for its first character; a literary reading in a classical quotation will usually lose out to the everyday one. So any polyphone on the canvas can be clicked and corrected from a list of its possible readings, and the correction flows straight into the preview and into the exported PDF — it is not an annotation that only exists on screen.

Appearance is adjustable too. Pinyin size, colour and tone marks can all be changed, which matters more than it sounds: on a page where the pinyin is set in the same grey as a background illustration, or the tone marks are small enough to be ambiguous, the reader loses exactly the information the pinyin was there to provide. And the pinyin layer can be switched off entirely if you want a plain-text version of the same book — useful for a child who is past needing the scaffolding, or for a second copy aimed at an adult reading the story aloud.

The advice here is blunt: always read the book through once before exporting to check polyphones. It is the one step that is never worth skipping, because a wrong tone on a page a child will read ten times is worse than a slightly clumsy layout that nobody notices. For background on when readings change, see tone change rules and the polyphonic characters reference.

Export and printing: you get a real multi-page PDF

Clicking Export PDF downloads an actual `.pdf` file. It does not open a print dialog and leave you to save it yourself, and that difference matters enormously for a picture book. Only a programmatically generated file guarantees that every page comes out at exactly the page size you chose, that illustrations run to the edge with no white margin, and that the page order matches what you edited. Print-dialog export gives you a file whose margins and scaling depend on the dialog settings at that moment — the classic source of a book whose pages are 96 per cent of the intended size and whose last page is cut off.

Three page sizes are offered, and each suits a different situation. Square, 210 × 210 mm, is the most book-like: it is the shape of most published picture books, it sits comfortably in a child's hands, and it makes a single illustration the natural centre of attention. A4 portrait, 210 × 297 mm, is the easiest to print and bind at home, because it is the paper already in your printer tray and it needs no trimming to look tidy. Landscape, 297 × 167 mm, suits wide compositions — a panorama, a train crossing a page, a long river scene — and reads well as a two-page spread on screen. Export resolution is set for print rather than screen, so body text stays crisp rather than jagged when it comes off a laser printer.

On printing itself, a few things make a real difference. Keep the page count even so double-sided printing lines up without a blank page stranded at the back. Use matte paper of 120 gsm or heavier, so pages feel substantial and the illustration on the reverse does not show through under the text. For binding, saddle stitches (two or three staples through the fold) are ideal for thin books, while thicker books need perfect binding or a visit to a copy shop for comb or coil binding. At a print shop, ask for original size, double-sided, colour, and hand over the PDF rather than a screenshot of it. More detail is in printing and binding.

One limitation deserves stating honestly rather than hiding: text inside the exported PDF is rasterised into the artwork, so it cannot be selected or searched. That is the trade-off of an approach with no server and no embedded fonts, and it is what guarantees that Chinese characters and tone-marked pinyin never come out as empty boxes on a machine that lacks the right font. You lose copy-paste; you gain a file that prints correctly anywhere.

Where your draft lives, and how to move it to another device

Everything you make in the studio is stored in your own browser. Close the tab, come back tomorrow, and your book is still there — with no account, no sign-in and no email address required. For most people making a book at the kitchen table, that is the right trade: nothing to register for, nothing to forget a password to.

To move a book to another computer, or to hand a draft to another parent or teacher, use Export project, which produces a `.pbproj.json` file, and then Import project on the other device. Text, illustrations, layout choices and your corrected readings all come back exactly as they were, which matters most for the polyphone fixes — those are the work you least want to redo. Treat that project file as your backup.

A clear warning is in order, because browser storage is not permanent. Clearing your browser data, switching to a different browser, or working in private browsing mode may lose a draft. Private windows in particular throw everything away when they close. So export the project file for anything you care about, and re-import it if the draft disappears. It takes a few seconds and it is the only thing standing between an evening's work and nothing.

There is deliberately no online library, share link or cloud sync. Those features require a server to run and maintain, and that cost — in money and in your privacy — is better spent on the tool itself. Moving a book between devices is done with a file you control, which is also the version of "sharing" that does not upload your child's photographs anywhere.

Privacy and content boundaries

The text you type and the illustrations you upload never leave your device. Pinyin is computed in the browser, images are compressed and laid out locally, and nothing is sent to a server at any point in the process — which is why the studio works with no account and why it keeps working if you disconnect from the network mid-book. Full details are in the privacy policy.

Illustrations are your responsibility, and the rule is straightforward: use images you have the right to use. That means your own photographs, your own drawings and paintings, scanned pages of your own sketchbooks, or assets explicitly licensed for reuse under terms you have actually read. The studio ships with no third-party illustration library, and that is on purpose: a built-in gallery of pretty pictures would inevitably include assets whose licensing does not survive the moment a parent uploads the finished book to a school website. With no library, that problem cannot arise.

The book and its copyright are entirely yours. You made the story and the pictures; the tool only arranged them. And on scope: this is a general-purpose creative tool for adults — parents, teachers, tutors and anyone else preparing reading and teaching material for children. It is not itself a product aimed at children, and it is designed to be operated by an adult who knows what the book is for. The rules of use are in the terms of service.

Questions people actually ask

How much text should go on one page?

Thirty to sixty characters is the comfortable range for a page aimed at a young reader; below thirty the page feels thin, above sixty the reader starts losing their place. The studio watches this for you: when text overflows the text area it warns you, and the useful response is almost always to split the passage onto the next page rather than shrink the type. Cramming is the most common reason a homemade picture book is hard to read.

What are the limits on illustrations?

JPG, PNG and WebP are accepted, up to 5 MB per image. Images are compressed on your device before layout, so the working file stays responsive — nothing is uploaded, and the compression is what keeps a twenty-page book from becoming slow. For the smoothest experience, compress very large photographs first: a 12 MB phone photo will work, but it will slow every subsequent redraw of the preview.

Can I reuse one illustration on two pages?

Yes, and it is a common and useful trick — a refrain page that repeats the same image with different text, or a character shown again later. The clean way is to duplicate the page and change the text, which preserves your positioning and zoom exactly; the alternative is to upload the same image again on the new page and reframe it, which is worth doing only when you want a different crop.

Why can't I select the text in the exported PDF?

Because the text is rasterised into the artwork, as described above. Rendering it as an image is what guarantees that Chinese characters and tone-marked pinyin appear correctly on any device, regardless of installed fonts — the alternative would risk a print shop's machine substituting a font with no CJK coverage and returning your book as rows of empty boxes. You lose searchability; you gain a file that always prints as designed.

How many pages should a picture book have?

Twelve to twenty-four pages is the norm for young children, and that is a good target for a first project: long enough to feel like a real book, short enough to finish. The studio allows up to forty. Whatever number you land on, keep the count even, because odd counts are what produce a stray blank page when the book is printed double-sided.

Do I need to set the cover and end page separately?

Page types are cover, story page and end page, and the first and last are worth using deliberately. The cover shows the title and the byline, and it is the only page where large type is appropriate. The end page can hold "The End", a closing line, or a short note to the reader — a small thing that makes the book feel finished rather than trailing off. Everything between them is story pages.

How do I start over?

Use New book, which clears the current book and its draft. Be aware that it clears the draft as well as the canvas, so if there is any chance you will want the old version back, export the project file first. There is no undo history that survives a page reload, and no cloud copy waiting to be recovered.

Where to go next

The Tutorials hub collects every guide on this site, including the pinyin fundamentals and the classroom material. If you would rather build a book without the studio at all, making a pinyin picture book by hand covers the manual route with a word processor and an image editor. Once your PDF is exported, printing and binding takes it the rest of the way onto paper.

And when the book is printed, the part that matters most is still ahead: reading it with a child covers how to use a book like this at the table, without turning it into a test. Then go back and start a book in Picture Book Studio — it is open, it is free, and the first draft really does take about fifteen minutes.