The folks who created Pagemaker version 6.5 "wised up" and incorporated the use of layers. Layers are an intuitive way to stack and order objects and they give you a powerful way to control the layout of your documents. Essentially, layers in Pagemaker work the same way as they do in photoshop, so rather than rehash a lot information here, see the photoshop section on layer use. (Ignore the information on opacity and blending modes as they are not available in Pagemaker.)

Yet another way that you can control the "stacking" of objects within a Pagemaker document is to use the Arrange command.

You may run into a situation where objects overlap in the wrong fashion. If you create a paragraph of text for instance, and later create a rectangular shape that you want to use as a text box, the "box" will be on top of the text.

To set the stacking order of objects do the following:

• Select the object that you want to arrange.
• Choose Element > Arrange and then,
• Choose either Bring to Front, Bring Forward, Send Backward, or Send to Back
    depending on how you want objects to be stacked

Note: Either one of these strategies will work to stack objects, but layers will give you much more control. A layer can be "turned off", for instance.

You will use layers in the other programs we will be learning throughout the quarter so it is a good idea to get comfortable with them now