Adding and Modifying Objects
Pages lets you plow a wide range of design elements into your documents—text boxes, pictures, movies, sounds, shapes, tables, and charts. As varied as these visual components might seem, they’re much more alike than different. In Pages, all these elements are called objects, and you move, layer, and adjust them using the same basic techniques. It’s like a pageant: Although each of these beauties has its own distinct talent, they all follow the same rules.
This chapter introduces you to most of Pages’ objects (you’ll get to know more about tables and charts in the next chapter) and then shows you all the graphical magic that you can unlock in all of them. From workaday actions like selecting and moving objects to spinning them in place or adding shadows, reflections, and borders, this chapter gives you the know-how to build sophisticated layouts with ease.
Floating vs. Inline Objects
Objects are the building blocks of page-layout documents. Every object on the page is contained in its own invisible box, and you grab its box to resize, move, or shuffle it. At its most basic level, creating a page layout is about arranging these boxes to your liking—a text box here, an image over there, a table down below, a shape behind it all to add a splash of color. But objects aren’t limited to flashy page-layout documents. They live happily in word-processing documents, too, where you can use them to illustrate your text with pictures, charts, text-box sidebars, ...
