iWork '05: The Missing Manual

Chapter 2. Formatting Your Document

Composing basic text documents on your computer dramatically morphed into desktop publishing in 1985. Magic happened that year when publishers big and small loaded up the new Macintosh with Aldus PageMaker software and connected the whole rig to the even newer PostScript laser printers. Suddenly anyone could create and print formatted text documents. No longer did you need a typesetting machine to produce beautiful (or dreadful) pages containing fonts of different sizes and styles. Done with panache or with amateurish abandon, formatting is what separates modern computer word processing from Remingtons, Underwoods, and WordPerfect for DOS. This chapter covers everything you need to know about formatting your documents and introduces you to Pages' built-in spell checker.

Formatting Your Documents

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

• Character (or font) formatting includes all the modifications you can apply to each individual character: font, size, style, and color. You can make these changes to single characters or to words, paragraphs, entire pages, or the whole document—whatever you've highlighted before applying the formatting commands described below.

• Paragraph formatting modifies the way a paragraph or group of paragraphs appear, including line spacing, tabs, indents, ...