iWork '09: The Missing Manual

Formatting Paragraphs

All the text-styling you’ve seen so far can be applied to any selection—as little as a single character—but Pages offers another category of formatting options which apply to whole paragraphs at a time. These settings include line spacing, tabs, indentation, and paragraph background color. (Formatting lists with bullets and numbering is also a type of paragraph formatting, and you’ll learn more about that later in this chapter; see Working with Lists.)

Since these formatting styles apply to the entire paragraph, all you have to do is put your insertion point anywhere within the paragraph you want to change—no need to highlight the whole thing precisely from end to end. You can have a selection within the paragraph highlighted, or you can just click anywhere inside. To apply paragraph formatting to several paragraphs, you can select just a part of those paragraphs, grabbing the last few words of one paragraph and the first few of the next, for example. The point here: It’s okay to be sloppy when it comes to selecting text for paragraph formatting. However you do it, when you make the change, Pages updates all the text in any paragraphs included in your selection.

When you press Return and start a new paragraph, that paragraph inherits the formatting of its predecessor. You can type merrily away, and your formatting will stay the same from paragraph to paragraph until you decide to make another change.

Aligning Your Text

You can use one of the most basic paragraph ...