Adding Grimoire Pages | digital Book of Shadows | Xodo, Goodnotes, Noteshelf

Digital grimoire pages are a great way to add substance and style to your grimoire or book of shadows. In this tutorial, I will briefly discuss the methods used for physical and digital books, with an emphasis placed on the digital format.

How to Add Digital Grimoire pages to a Physical Book

With a physical book, you can accomplish this easily by purchasing a printable grimoire page from a marketplace like Etsy or Creative Market. The design can then be printed on your choice of paper and added directly (works best with post style books) or pasted onto an existing blank page. For a more authentic, aged look, you may want to prepare the paper by staining it with coffee or tea and embellish your page by layering other elements (dried herbs, snippets of text, etc.). There are numerous tutorials on these methods available by doing a quick search online, so I will not go into this method in any more detail here.

How to Add Digital Grimoire pages to a Digital Book

Here I’ll get into my preferred way of adding a digital grimoire page to a digital book by demonstrating with The Organized Witch’s digital Book of Shadows planner.

Step 1

Purchase and download your digital grimoire page from the marketplace of your choice.

These digital pages may be available as several different file types, such as PNG, JPG, or PDF. The method shown below works with image files like PNG or JPG.

The V&R pages are available as transparent PNG files from Etsy here: https://www.etsy.com/shop/VervainAndRueBySusan

Step 2

Before adding the grimoire page to your digital book or planner, check how large the file is. Good file size is less than 1 MB to ensure that your added images don’t cause your book to load too slowly. You can use a compression software site like compresspng.com or compressjpg.com to minimize the size of images you’ll be adding. I follow this step no matter what size file I’m adding just to ensure my book doesn’t get too big in terms of computer space.

Step 3

Open the digital book you will be adding your grimoire page to in your choice of annotation program. Examples of these programs include Goodnotes and Noteshelf for tablets and Xodo for mobile and windows-based devices.

 Navigate to the page where you will be adding your grimoire page. For the purpose of adding the page full-size, look for a blank page. The Organized Witch’s Digital Book of Shadows Planner has blank pages located in all sections of the book as well as a dedicated notes section that is full of blank pages. In the video tutorial created for this blog post, I will be adding the Protection Magic grimoire page to the facing page of the Spells section. Another example would be to add the Damiana grimoire page to a blank page in the Botanicals section or the Yule page onto the facing page for the December monthly calendar page. You get the idea!

Step 4

The process of importing and adding or “pasting” your grimoire page into your book varies depending on which annotation program you are using to open your grimoire. Below and in the video, I explain how to do this step in Xodo, There are additional written instructions below for Goodnotes and Noteshelf. 

Adding a digital image to Xodo (using a windows PC)

1. After opening your digital book in Xodo, navigate to the page where you would like to add your grimoire image file.
2. Right-click anywhere on the page to bring up the command bar. Select the “Edit” tool at the top right of the screen (looks like a pencil)
3. Click on the “Stamper” tool (looks like an image icon) then click on the page of your book to bring up the image insert command bubble.
4. Select “From Files”, navigate to the image file you’d like to paste, click on the file to select it and select Open. Your image file will be imported onto the page.
5. Drag one of the corners to re-size it. Left click and drag to move it on the page.
6. Once you have your image at the desired size and location, choose either Done (to keep the image editable) or Flatten (to merge it onto the page)

Adding a digital image to Goodnotes or Noteshelf (using an Ipad)\

1. After opening your digital book in the annotation program, navigate to the page where you would like to add your grimoire image file.
2. Open the folder window: pull up from the bottom of the screen & drag to the right.
3. Click & drag the grimoire image file onto the page.
4. Now you can resize and move the image wherever you'd like it on the page.

You are now done adding in your grimoire page (or any other image file) and can continue working in your digital Book of Shadows or Grimoire.

View the Tutorials Section of this blog for more how to’s on personalizing The Organized Witch’s Digital Book of Shadows Planner

Happy Planning Witches!

xoxo 

Susan