iWork '09: The Missing Manual

Spaces, Invisibles, and Special Characters

So far, this chapter has reviewed how to format your text to make it more pleasing to the eye. But what about what the eye can’t see? Don’t look now, but your Pages document and your keyboard are both teeming with hidden symbols. Here’s how to unleash these mysterious characters.

Viewing Invisibles

While you’re crafting your words and paragraphs, you probably don’t give much thought to the spaces between them, but they’re not as empty as you might think. There’s a whole universe of invisible characters living in that white space. Every time you press the space bar, the Tab key, or the Return key, for example, Pages adds a formatting character to your document. These formatting marks are called invisibles because, you guessed it, you can’t normally see them, except for the space they leave behind. They’re conspicuous by their absence.

Note

Joining these rather ordinary spacing characters are several other invisibles, which stand in for more complex formatting. These include page breaks, section breaks, column breaks, layout breaks, and anchor points which you’ll learn about in the coming chapters.

As you format your document, it can be helpful to see the details of these spacing characters: Are those line breaks or paragraph breaks? Spaces or tabs? Is that an extra space between those two words?

The challenge with seeing invisibles is, of course, their invisibility. Many of these characters—specifically, all the “breaks,” including paragraph breaks, ...