iWork® '09 Portable Genius

Chapter 3. How Can I Get the Most Out of Styles and Formatting?

With fonts, colors, alignment, line spacing, indentation, background colors, and more, Pages gives you precise control of how the text in your document looks. With all these options, it's all too easy to spend ages perfecting your documents' formatting if you approach the process the wrong way. The key to formatting text efficiently is to use styles to format as much of your document as possible. You can then add special effects by applying direct formatting such as bold, italics, or colors where needed. A further benefit of using styles is that you can use outline view to develop the structure of your document quickly.

Formatting Text Quickly with Styles

Creating Custom Styles

Keeping Paragraphs and Lines Together

Creating Your Own Templates

Developing a Document's Structure with Outline View

Formatting Text Quickly with Styles

A style is simply a collection of formatting settings that you can apply instantly to a paragraph or to one or more characters.

Pages provides four different kinds of styles:

• Paragraph style. A complete set of formatting for a paragraph. The paragraph style includes font formatting, alignment, indentation, and line spacing settings, and even a setting that controls which style Pages gives the next paragraph.

  Note

  Each paragraph always has a paragraph style. In a new blank document, the first paragraph is ...