Free Panels

Maybe you want to have some panels in your comic that are not locked in to the normal page structure. There are two kinds of panels that serve this need. They can both be positioned anywhere on the page, so we refer to them together as free panels.

Inset Panels

Inset panels appear to be on the same plane as the regular page structure panels, but they punch their shape out of the panels that they overlap, with the comic’s gutter size defining the gap between them and regular panels.

While inset panels appear to be on the same plane with regular panels, they are actually in front of them, and they also have a meaningful front to back order among themselves. When inset panels overlap, the one that is in front punches its shape out of the one behind it.

Floating Panels

Floating panels are panels that float in front of all regular panels and all inset panels, blocking out part of the panels underneath without affecting their shape.

Creating Free Panels

Both types of free panels are created with commands in the Comic menu. Use New Floating Panel to create a new floating panel and New Inset Panel to create a new inset panel. The location and style of the new panel will be determined by the current panel when you choose the command. The new panel’s style will be copied from the current panel. The new panel’s location will be set according to the location of the current panel. If the current panel is a regular panel, the new panel will be smaller than the current panel and inside it near its top left corner. (Unless the current panel is below a certain minimum size.) If the current panel is a free panel, the new panel will be the same size and positioned to the right of the current panel, with the comic’s gap size between them. (Unless this makes it go over the right edge of the page.)

Editing Free Panels

Both types of free panel are edited in the same ways. When a free panel is the current panel, it displays a striped version of the current panel highlight and reshaping handles.

The striped frame can be used to drag the panel around the page. The handles can be used to reshape it.

All panels, including free panels, are defined by four corner points. When a free panel is first created, these four points are always arranged to form a rectangular shape, but they are not required to stay that way. Dragging one of the handles without a modifier always reshapes the panel while maintaining the current angles of the sides and corners, so if the panel is rectangular it stays rectangular. However, dragging a handle with the Command key allows a more unrestricted reshaping. Dragging a side handle this way retains the angle and length of the side, but allows it to be moved in both dimensions, altering the sides connected to it and all four corner angles. If it’s rectangular, you can make it into a parallelogram this way. Dragging a corner handle with the Command key moves just that corner, allowing your to create more freeform quadrilaterals. All forms of reshaping panels force the shape to remain convex.

Remember that it is the defining corners of a panel that are quadrilateral. Depending on roundness and shape settings that can be made in the Panel Properties dialog , the panel itself can have a variety of actual shapes.

A variety of inset panels shapes.

Front to Back Order

If you have free panels that overlap each other, you can change their front-to-back order with the Bring Panel Forward and Send Panel Backward commands in the Comic menu. Because floating panels are always in front of inset panels and inset panels are always in front of regular panels in the page structure, these commands are limited to keeping the panel acted on in those layers. Note that inset panels don’t draw overlapped, but instead the front one punches out its shape from the back one. So for inset panels, this command changes which one punches its shape out of the other.