iWork '09: The Missing Manual

Chapter 3. Creating and Using Styles

When you create a word processing document in Pages, you usually use a small assortment of formatting styles over and over again. In a short piece, formatting your titles or the occasional quote is no big deal; just highlight each and use the Format Bar to change its size, color, and so on.

But consider the longer document. What if your manuscript contains 200 headings, plus another 50 sidebar boxes and a slew of footnotes, captions, long quotations, and other heavily formatted elements? In such documents—this book, for example—manually formatting every heading, subheading, sidebar, and caption to make them all consistent would drive you nuts. Add to that the headache of accidentally pasting in fonts and styles from other documents or other portions of your text, and it’s all too easy to spend more time toggling formatting buttons than actually writing.

Styles ease the pain. Here’s the concept: You format a chunk of text exactly the way you want it—font, paragraph formatting, color, spacing, and so on—and then tell Pages to memorize all that formatting as a style. A style is a prepackaged bundle of formatting rules that you can apply with a click of the mouse; highlight some text, choose a saved style, and you’re done. Repeat the process for all the styles you need: headings, sidebar styles, picture captions, whatever. You end up with a collection of custom-tailored styles for each of the repeating elements in your document. Figure 3-1 gives you ...