For all its emphasis on creating gorgeous documents, Pages recognizes that writing is a very different activity than page layout. Pages offers one mode for text-intensive projects, and another for creating more extravagant multimedia designs, as shown in Figure 1-1. This gives Pages an unusual but highly functional split personality: Pages is essentially two programs in one, and when you fire up a new document, you choose the one you prefer for the job at hand.
Figure 1-1. Pages gives you two different modes to work in. Top: Word-processing mode puts the focus on your words, for text-intensive projects. Bottom: Page-layout mode lets you juggle complex designs, combining text and graphics into stunning results.
Pages’ workhorse word processor puts your text in the spotlight, providing an uncluttered workspace where you can get your thoughts onscreen with a minimum of fuss. Pages doesn’t reinvent the wheel here; if you’ve ever used a word processor before, this will feel familiar. Here the program gives you one big text area where you type a single, continuous chunk of text, adjusting font styles and formatting as you go. The word processor gives you plenty of options to augment your text with images, tables, and charts, but the emphasis remains on your words. From quick to-do lists to opus-length manuscripts, the text itself is the main (and often only) design element in these babies.
Pages supports your writing with a slew of helpful tools like spell checking, outlining, and change tracking, but Apple’s word processor still does not have every last feature that you’ll find over at the competition. If you’ve been a Microsoft Word power user in a past life, you may eventually notice some missing features like macros, index building, “word art,” and so on. There’s a silver lining here: What Pages might lose in skipping this kitchen-sink litany of features it gains back with a light, streamlined environment. As you get acquainted with Pages, you’ll find that its slender diet of toolbars and other “window chrome” helps you stay focused on actually getting stuff done. This focus is where the Pages word processor shines.
But where Pages really departs from other programs is in its other half, the word processor’s alter ego….
Persuasion sometimes requires more than words, and Pages lets you deck out your work with photos, graphics, charts—even movies and music. In page-layout mode, you design your document one page at a time, using lots of smaller elements instead of editing a single monolithic block of text. You shuttle text boxes and graphics around the page, setting your design like a graphic artist pasting up a canvas in a less digital era. Sophisticated multipage projects like newsletters, catalogs, magazines, or brochures become a matter of drag and drop. Built-in image-editing tools make graphical single-page layouts like posters, flyers, or invitations a snap.
When you launch Pages, the program prompts you to choose either a word-processing template (see Your First Word-Processing Document) or a page-layout template (see Other Word-Processing Document Types), and you’re off. But you can’t have it both ways. When you create a new file, you pick one format or the other, and you can’t switch between the two modes. Once a word-processing document, always a word-processing document; ditto for page layout.
This isn’t quite as Draconian as it sounds. Both document types are part of the same program, after all, and it turns out they share many of the same features. As you’ll discover in the coming chapters, you can include page-layout elements in word-processing documents, and you can do word processing in page-layout documents. It’s not all or nothing, but rather a matter of emphasis: Does your new document focus on developing a single work of text (word processing), or does it involve the page-by-page layout of several design elements (page layout). Table 1-1 offers some examples.
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