iWork '09: The Missing Manual

Word Processor Text vs. Text Boxes

As you saw in the last chapter, 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. In page-layout documents, text instead shows up as little islands, independent text boxes that you can slide around the page freestyle. As you’ll learn in Chapter 7, word-processing documents can actually contain both text types, letting you sprinkle text-box islands into your written river as callouts and sidebars (see Pull quotes and sidebars).

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 floating around your page-layout window. A text box is mobile, and word processor text isn’t—other than that, editing text inside those elements works exactly the same way.

In fact, once you’ve mastered text editing in Pages, you’ve got it nailed in Keynote and Numbers, too. Both programs include text boxes, just like Pages. Although Pages gives you a few more text-formatting options than its iWork cousins, the essentials remain the same across all three programs, right down to the interface buttons and tools that you use to format your text.