iWork 05: The Missing Manual

When the blank document window appears (Figure 1-4), your first thought might be, "Where is everything?" Apple's software designers have pared the document window down to the bone, opting for a Danish-modern starkness instead of the rococo of most word processing programs. Despite this minimalist design, Pages gives you easy access to the commands you're most likely to need by placing them at the top of each page, while keeping the ones you need less oftenor for more esoteric taskshidden just below the surface.

You can choose to live with this minimalist window design, you can embellish it with more controls, or you can give the window a virtual makeover to express your own sense of style. However you wish to view your document window, mastering the placement of various tools and controls is the first step to creating and editing great Pages documents.

1.2.1. Using The Toolbar

Gracing the top of the document window with its colorful buttons is the toolbar. The toolbar gives you one-click access to common commands, saving mileage on your mouse and strain on your memory by keeping these items right in front of you at all times. You'll learn more about each of these buttons in the coming chapters, but here's the condensed version for the standard button set:

• Pages . The first button is a pop-up menu (as indicated by the tiny black triangle next to the icon) that lets you add additional pages to your document. If you're using the Blank template, clicking this button just adds another blank page. But most of the other templates provide a variety of coordinated page designs you can choose from (see Section 4.1.1.1).

• Columns . Next is another pop-up menu that lets you change the number of text columns in your document. Pages can create from one to four newspaper-style columns across the page, so that the text flows from the bottom of one column to the top of the next (Section 3.4).

• Style . The Style pop-up menu lets you quickly apply paragraph styles contained in the template or that you've added to the style collectionfor example, a headline style, a subhead style, and a body style (Section 3.2).

• List . Similar to the Style button, the List pop-up menu applies specialized styles useful for lists and outlines (Section 3.3).

• Objects . This pop-up menu lets you add a text box, chart, or table. Or you can use it to draw lines, arrows, or simple geometric shapes (Section 4.2.4).

• Wrap . The last of the pop-up menu buttons controls if and how text wraps around pictures or objectslike the ones created by the Objects button (Section 4.3.7).

• Inspector . This button summons or dismisses the Inspector window , the command center for formatting your document and all the elements it contains. The 10 panes of this window contain controls for document and text formatting, chart and table construction, bookmark and hyperlink creation, and more (Section 3.3.1).

• Media . Click this button to bring up or remove the Media Browser window, the shortcut to your entire collection of iPhotos, iTunes, and movies. Just drag from the Browser to place a photo, for example, onto your page (Section 4.2.1).

• Colors . These last two buttons access tools that are actually part of OS X, though they're seamlessly integrated with Pages. The Color Picker appears when you click this button. Use this palette any time you need to change the color of text, objects, backgrounds, and so on (Section 4.4).

• Fonts . The OS X Font panel comes to the fore when you click this button, giving you control of your entire font collection. You can select fonts, adjust their size , view their appearance in a preview pane, add strikethrough , text shadow, and more (Section 2.1.1).

1.2.1.1. Customizing the toolbar

Banish this button banner completely if you find it too distracting, by choosing View Hide Toolbar, pressing -Option-T, or, easiest of all, pressing the oblong button in the upper-right corner of the document window. However, you'll probably want to keep the toolbar around while you're working on most documents. If you've dismissed it, you can call it back by repeating any of the three commands just listedexcept this time the menu reads View Show Toolbar. In terms of word processing efficiency, youll find it's much more valuable to customize it to show only the buttons you want.

Choose View Customize Toolbar (or Control-click the toolbar and choose Customize Toolbar from the pop-up menu) and Pages displays its entire collection of buttons on a sheet that drops from the toolbar (Figure 1-5). Now you can drag buttons you dont want off the toolbar and see them vanish in a puff of smoke. Add to the toolbar by dragging individual items into place on the bar; the buttons already residing there politely shift aside to make room for the newcomer. Once the buttons are in the bar, you can drag them around to change their position.

Most of the toolbar buttons perform various commands you'd otherwise have to dig through the menus to find. But you'll find three items in the bottom row of buttons designed to help you keep your newly customized toolbar organized: a separator line, a fixed space, and a flexible space.

If you're a real customization aficionado, you can even add a Customize button to the toolbar so you can quickly summon the customization sheet when the spirit moves you to modify your button collection. If you add more buttons than can fit in the windowor if you make your window narroweran arrow appears at the right end of the toolbar. Click it and a mini menu appears, containing the button overflow.

And if, after a frenzy of toolbar transformation, you decide you liked it better the way Apple shipped it from the factory, just drag the entire default set back up to the toolbar and Pages replaces your custom arrangement with the batch of basic buttons.

1.2.2. Changing Your Page View

The toolbar buttons at the top of the window let you add more pages to your document and control its formatting. The controls at the bottom of the window affect how you view the document onscreenthese buttons don't alter the way it's formatted or printed.

For example, you can use the Page View menu in the lower-left corner of the document window (Figure 1-6) to adjust how large the page appears on your screen. New Pages documents appear at 125 percent, which is close to actual size on modern, high-resolution monitors . Click that percentage to choose a different magnification from a pop-up menu, from 25 to 400 percent. For the menu-centric Pages fan, similar controls are available via the View Zoom menu.

Along with the zoom percentages in the Page View pop-up menu, you'll find a couple of other controls. At the top of the list is a bit of pressroom jargon called n-up . This represents how many pages (the number n) Pages prints on one sheetor in this case, displays in one window (Figure 1-7). In the Page View menu, you can choose One Up (the normal view, or one page across in the window) or Two Up (two pages across in the window). You'll want to use the two-up view when laying out something that'll end up as bound or folded pages, like a booklet or brochure. You'll find two automatic zoom settings at the bottom of the Page View pop-up menu. Fit Width adjusts the magnification so the page precisely fits the width of the document windowwhether it's three inches or 13 inches wide. Fit Page (which should really be called Fit Height), on the other hand, adjusts the magnification so that one full page is displayed in the available height of the window. Turn on either of these settings and the magnification automatically changes as you adjust the window size with the window-resizing handle in the bottom-right corner of the window.