iWork 05: The Missing Manual
2.1. Formatting Your Documents

Pages divides its formatting abilitiesthe variety of ways it can modify your text and the overall document's appearanceinto five formatting categories: Character, Paragraph, Layout, Section, and Document.

2.1.1. Character Formatting

Character formattingalso called font formattingcontrols the appearance of a single letter, a word, a paragraph, or even an entire document. You'll find controls for adjusting character formatting in four places within Pages: the Font panel, the Text Inspector, the Format menu, and the shortcut pop-up menus (Figure 2-1).

Tip: Select any text you want to change before using the formatting commands below, otherwise the formatting affects whatever you type next at the blinking insertion point.
2.1.1.1. The OS X Font panel

To choose or change a font, adjust its size, color, shadow, and more, click the toolbar's Fonts button or choose Format Fonts Show Fonts. The Font panel appears. Now you have access to all the fonts on your computer, and extensive controls to modify their appearance (see Figure 2-2).

Tip: If you miss having a real font menu that displays fonts in their actual typeface, you're not alone. Although Apple seems to think the Font panel replaces a font menu, it can be inconvenient to open a special window just to change fontsespecially if you have a small screen. Restore this missing menu to Pagesand to most of your OS X applicationswith a little program called FontSight from Stone Design. This $30 gem adds a font submenu to the Format menu, giving you access to all of your typefaces right from the menu bar. Download a free trial copy at www.stone.com.

The heart of the Font panel is the display of columns that list your font Collections (font groupings that came on your computer or that you've created), the font Family (the font nameHelvetica or Times, for example), the Typeface (the font styleplain, bold, italic, and so on), and the size. Select All Fonts under Collections to see every font available on your computer. Work your way through the columns from left to right to select a font, style and size.

Figure 2-1. You can apply bold, italic, underline, or outline styles; or show or hide the Font panel or Color Picker by using shortcut menus. Control-click (or right-click) selected text in your document and find these commands under the Font submenu. These mini pop-up menus appear throughout iWorkindeed, throughout most Mac programs. Their contents change depending on where you're clicking when you invoke them. Try clicking various Pages windows in this fashion as an experiment. You'll discover alternative methods to perform a variety of commands.

Professional designers and typesetters may roll their eyes, but when you're starting from scratch with the Blank document template, Pages assumes Helvetica is your favorite font. Helvetica is a sans serif font, best suited for headlines and small amounts of text. Serif fonts like Times or Palatino are better for body text.

With most word processors, you can just change a preference setting to choose a different standard, or default, fontbut with Pages' page-layout approach to word processing you have to create a new template with your preferred font. Slightly annoying, but doable. The next section shows you how.

Changing the standard font . To create a new template with a new standard font style, begin by choosing the Blank template to create a new document (page 2). Select the font in the size you prefer for your new standard. (Now's also the ideal time to make any other changes you want for your standard documentfor example, margins, text alignment, and so on. You'll find details on how to make those adjustments later in this chapter.) Choose File Save as Template. Give the template a name such as, "Blank-Times-12 and click Save.

Your newly minted template appears in the Template Chooser window in the category "My Templates." Now you can select it instead of the Blank template as a starting point for your normal documents.

The font effects toolbar . You can further format your font in the Font panel after you've selected the basics of font, style, and size. You'll find a row of buttons in the Font panel controlling various font special effects such as color, strikethrough style, and text shadow. See Figure 2-2 for a rundown of all the options.

Figure 2-2. Use the Font panel toolbar to add a variety of special effects to your text. None of these effects show up in the font panel's Preview windowonly in your document. The Underline button (A) lets you add single or double underlines and choose the underline color. The Strikethrough button (B) applies a single or double line through your text, and lets you choose the line's color. Click the Text Color button (C) and the Color Picker pops up ready for you to choose a character color. A click of the misnamed Document Color button (D) also brings up the Color Picker, this time applying the color to the background of the selected paragraph(s). (Be sure to experiment with the Color Picker's Opacity slider when using background shading.) You can apply an artistic shadow to selected text by clicking the Text Shadow button (E). You can add a text shadow to add drama to a headlineor make body text nearly unreadable. Four controls (F) adjust the shadow's opacity, blurriness , offset, and its angle from the original text. Use the "+" and "-" buttons to create or remove font collections (G), and click the Actions pop-up menu (H) to access an assortment of Font panel view options and yet more font formatting controls.

The Actions Menu . You can control the Font panel's behavior and access some of the more esoteric font settings through the Actions menu. Click the Actions pop-up menu at the bottom of the Font panelit looks like a gearto see these options.

2.1.1.2. The Text Inspector

After you've formatted your fonts using the Font Panel, the next stop is the Text Inspector. Use the Text Inspector's Text pane to control character spacing and access another way to change font color (see Figure 2-3). Choose View Show Inspector or click the Inspector button on the toolbar, and then click the Text button in the Inspector palette. Finally, click the Text tab to reveal the text color (also available via the Font Palette, described above) and character spacing controls.

GEM IN THE ROUGH

Playing Favorites with Templates

If you find you're always starting Pages with the same template, you can save yourself the extra steps of going through the Template Chooser every time by specifying a standard template for new documents.

  1. Choose Pages Preferences .

    The Preferences window appears. In the top section "For New Documents," click the "Use template" button.

  2. Click Choose .

    The Template Chooser appears. Locate the template you'd like for your standard document and double-click it (or click once to select it, and then click Choose or press Return).

    The Template Chooser disappears and the Preferences window reflects your choice on the "Use template" line.

  3. Close the Preferences window .

    From now on, when you launch Pages or choose Pages New Document (or press -N), Pages bases the new document on your favored template.

Once you set this preference for new Pages documents, say adios to the Template Chooser. You only see it againand you can only select other Templatesif you change the "For New Documents" preference back to "Use Template Chooser."

When you click the Text Color sample box once again, you summon the Color Picker. Click a Color Picker color to load it into the Text Inspector. Any text you had highlighted changes to the new color; otherwise, typing at the insertion point reflects your new color choice.

The Character Spacing slider adjusts the amount of space between letters, known to typographers as tracking . You'd want to use this control, for example, to expand or contract a headline to perfectly fit above a column. Used judiciouslyjust a few percentthe effect is nearly invisible, yet it can make a big improvement to the appearance of your layout. Use it at higher or lower settings only if you're trying to attract attention.

Click the Text Inspector's More tab to get to one more character formatting control tucked in amongst the paragraph formatting controls: Baseline Shift. Use this setting to raise or lower the selected text relative to other text on the line. Use the up arrow button or enter the number of points in the box to raise the text; use the down arrow button or enter a negative number to lower the text.

Figure 2-3. Open Text Inspector Text to access controls for character and paragraph spacing, alignment, and text color. Click the Color box to call up the Color Picker with its five top buttons offering different approaches to picking colors (A). Click the magnifying glass (B) to turn your cursor into a color sampling tool that you can use to click any color on your screen, to load that color into the color swatch (C). Control the intensity of the color with the Opacity slideror enter a percentage in the box (D). Store your favorite colors for later use by dragging them from the swatch into the little squares at the bottom of the window (E). If one row of favorites isnt enough, drag the dot at the bottom edge to expand the window (F).

The Format Font Baseline menu holds commands for raising and lowering the baseline in one-point increments and for creating preset superscripts and subscriptsraised or lowered baselines and a smaller font sizewhich are useful for creating endnote reference numbers or chemical formulae (Figure 2-4). Youll find the Text Inspector's Baseline Shift control more flexible, however. With this control, you can make fractional -point adjustments to the baseline shiftjust what you might need for precision character tweaking when you're mixing different fonts on the same line, or need to adjust a trademark symbol, for example.

Note: If you raise or lower one or more characters' baselines, Pages increases the line spacing above or below that line. Pages can't create paragraphs with fixed line spacing.
2.1.1.3. The Format menu

By choosing Format Font you can access some of the same controls found in the Font panel and the Text Inspector. You can apply the basic font styles (bold, italic, underline, and so on); increase or decrease size; adjust tracking and baseline; and turn ligatures (see the upcoming sidebar "Ligatures: The Art of Linked Letters") or capitalization on or off (Figure 2-4). (Although you can select Format Font Ligature Use Default or Use All, this setting doesnt have any effect if ligatures are turned off in the Document Inspector for the entire document.)

Tip: Extensive formatting changes are usually part of the editing process, but it's easy to apply italics to a word or create a bold heading as you're typing. Immediately before the word you want to italicize , for example, press the keystroke for italics ( -I). Type the word, which now appears in italicsand then press the keystroke again . The first press turns italics on, the second turns it off.Similarly, -B turns boldface on and off; -U does the trick for underlining .
POWER USERS' CLINIC

Ligatures: The Art of Linked Letters

Ligatures are pairs of letters that share common components when printed next to each other. Scribes writing with pen and ink in the Middle Ages originally created ligatures to save space on the parchment and increase writing speedjust like when you cross two Ts in a word at once

Typographers now create these special combination characters to improve the printed text's appearance. The most common ligatures are ff, fi, fl, ffi, and ffl. Believe it or not, the ampersand (&) is actually a stylized ligature for the letters et Latin for and .

Figure 2-4. (A) Fine-tune the appearance of your text with ligatures (Font panel Actions menu Typography); (B) with tracking adjustments (Text Inspector Text tab Character Spacing); (B) by adjusting the position of the characters relative to the baseline (Format Font Baseline, or Text Inspector, More tab Baseline Shift); (B) by adjusting the position of the characters relative to the baseline and reducing their size (Format Font Baseline Superscript or Subscript); (E) and with capitalization (Format Font Capitalization).

Tip: Consider adding the Bigger and Smaller buttons to your toolbar so you can quickly increase or decrease font size. If you write numbers in exponential notation or often use chemical symbols, you could probably put the Subscript and Superscript toolbar buttons to good use, as well. (See Section 1.2, Customizing the toolbar.)
2.1.1.4. Paragraph formatting

Though Pages can apply formatting variations in a dizzying array at the character level, another style of formatting applies only to entire paragraphsline spacing, paragraph indents, margins, and so on.

UP TO SPEED

Un-Typewriter Class

Even though most computer owners haven't touched a typewriter for yearsif evermany bad habits persist from that earlier technology. Here are a few of the more egregious examples of typewriter style that are obsolete in the computer age.