iWork '09: The Missing Manual

Changing the Default Font

All Pages’ templates come with their own set of styles that define the document’s default fonts and styles. The Blank templates for word processing and page layout both give you 12-point Helvetica as the default font. If your personal font fondness leans elsewhere, you can customize those built-in styles to use your own preferred font, as you’ve seen. But ugh, that means that you have to customize the styles every time you open a new document by manually redefining all the paragraph styles, or by importing styles from another document. No thanks.

With most word processors, you can just change a preference setting to choose your standard font—but Pages’ emphasis on templates means that the default font rides along with each template, not in a global preference. That means that the easiest approach to getting your favorite font and styles at the outset of every new document is to create your own new template with your preferred font. Chapter 10 explores all the details of custom templates, but here’s the quick and dirty:

1. Create a new document from the Blank template.

2. Select your preferred typeface and font size.

   Make any other formatting changes—tabs, indentation, line spacing, and so on—that you would like to have for your main body text.

3. Choose View → Show Styles Drawer or click the Styles Drawer button in the Format Bar to slide out your styles.

4. In the Paragraph Styles pane, point to Free Form, click the downward arrow to the right, and select “Redefine Style ...