Editing Text in Pages
Beneath the program’s stylish veneer beats the heart of a full-featured word processor to help polish your prose to a high shine. Along the way, you can shape every aspect of your text’s visual presentation, from the sublime (ah, subtle typography tweaks) to the ridiculous (shadowed text!). This chapter covers everything you need to know about editing and formatting your text in Pages.
Word Processor Text vs. Text Boxes
Pages presents your text in one of two forms. It’s helpful to think of them as rivers and islands. In word processing documents, the main text flows through your entire document in one continuous river of words, a fixed part of your document landscape. But in a feature borrowed from page-layout documents, text can also appear as little islands, independent text boxes that you can slide around the page.
The important thing to remember is that no matter what form it might take in Pages, text is text. The same editing and formatting options are available to you whether you’re working with the main text of a word processing document or a text box.
Tip: For the full story on text boxes and other page-layout features, see Layout in Pages ’09: The Mini Missing Manual.
Basic Text Editing in Pages
Pages follows the Mac’s basic conventions for adding, editing, selecting, and moving text. If you’re familiar with other Mac software, you’ll feel right at home here. But even if you’re a longtime Mac user, you might not be aware of all the handy shortcuts ...
