iWork '09: The Missing Manual

Copying Objects and Graphic Styles

When you design longer documents, you often need to repeat similar objects over and over again, like the pull quotes and sidebars in the Up & Away catalog. For consistency, it’s important that these elements have the same color, shadow, border, text alignment, and so on. But ugh, who wants to repeat all those formatting steps every time you add a new pull quote? Pages offers a few features to help.

Figure 7-41. Adjust an object’s transparency by using the Opacity pop-up menu (A) in the Format Bar or the Opacity slider (B) in the Graphic Inspector. The “Mighty Halls of Justice” text box shown here has a black background with reduced opacity, creating a translucent layer for the headline.

When you want to create a new object, the easiest way to duplicate the look of another one is to clone the original and then edit the copy as necessary—copy another sidebar’s text box, for example, and fill it in with your new text. Pages provides three ways to copy an object:

• Copy and paste. Select the object to copy and choose Edit → Copy. Click where you want the copy to appear, and choose Edit → Paste.

• Option-drag. Hold down the Option key and drag the original object, and Pages gives you a copy.

• Duplicate. The Edit menu gives you a command to copy floating objects. Select the object to copy and choose Edit → Duplicate. Pages clones the object and adds the copy on ...