iWork '05: The Missing Manual

Chapter 3. Advanced Word Processing

When you need to produce documents that are long, complex, and really professional-looking, Pages is ready with a host of more advanced word processing features that benefit you as you write—and your reader as she reads. Being able to work efficiently and create consistently formatted pages is useful no matter what kind of document you're creating, but it becomes essential for longer ones.

This chapter begins with Find & Replace, an editing tool that can make short work of sifting through long documents; you'll also learn how to hunt down those essential but elusive invisible characters, like spaces. The rest of the chapter deals with page layout and document formatting, and how to use text styles, layouts, and sections to produce consistently formatted pages.

Find & Replace

Whether you're completing your 400-page novel or just polishing a three-page letter, you often have to change a word, a phrase, or even just a character that appears repeatedly throughout the manuscript. Consider these scenarios:

• You named the heroine in your new novel after your wife—she was, after all, your hero. But now she's your ex and you've got 692 mentions of Suzi to change to Jessica.

• You're just about to submit your term paper, Grammar and Punctuation: Its Time for a Change, when you realize you haven't quite mastered the difference between the contraction for it is and the possessive word it is.

• Every time you sit at your computer, you're thankful for having a great typing ...