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 2-1 gives you a taste of how helpful styles can be.
Figure 2-1: With just a few clicks, you can transform plain text (top left) into a formatted document (bottom right) and be certain that your headlines, captions, and all the rest maintain their uniformity throughout the document. Pages applies the font, size, style, color, margins, and so on all at once, freeing you to concentrate on the words themselves.
Once you’ve created your styles (details start on “Style Overrides”), you’ve done the hard part. Now, as you type along, you can choose styles as you need them. Since you’re no longer formatting by hand, Pages guarantees consistent page elements throughout the document. As you go through your document during the editing process, if you happen to notice you accidentally styled, for example, a headline using the subhead style, you can fix the problem by applying the correct style with a single click. Select the text you want to update, click the headline style, and your errant heading automatically falls in line with the correct formatting.
Even better, if you later decide that you want to use a different font for all your headings, you can just update the style definition, and Pages updates every heading faster than you can say, “Helvetica bold”—no need to go back through each and every heading to change it manually.
When You Need Styles: Know the Warning Signs
Styles are more than just a handy tool—they’re an essential part of good document hygiene. They keep your text clean, tidy, and consistent. If you’ve never used styles in your word processing—and most people haven’t—it’s time to start. Seriously: It’s a bad habit to go to the Format Bar every time you want to italicize text or change the font. Break that habit and use styles instead.
If you’re still not sure that styles are for you, you should at least get to know the warning signs. You know you need a style makeover when:
- The first thing you do when you open a document is go to the Format Bar to change the font or the text size.
- You frequently find yourself selecting the entire document to apply (or reapply) new formatting.
- You repeat the same formatting tasks over and over again when you add headings or other elements.
- You battle constantly with your fonts—you change the font of your text, for example, only to find that the old font pops back up when you type a new paragraph.
- You’re always reformatting text pasted into your document to fix font and size differences.
If any of these symptoms sound familiar, styles are the remedy. In fact—surprise!—every time you use Pages, you’re already using styles. Every Pages template, including the Blank templates, comes stocked with a prefab selection of styles, including the default font that Pages gives you when you open a new document from that template (see “Changing the Default Font”).
Style Central: Meet the Styles Drawer
Pages stashes your document styles in the Styles Drawer, a special panel that glides in and out from the side of your document window. Click View➝ Show Styles Drawer to slide it out, or click the Styles Drawer button in the Format Bar—the one shaped like a paragraph symbol (see Figure 2-2). To tuck it away again, click View➝Hide Styles Drawer, or click the Styles Drawer button again.
Note: The Styles Drawer typically makes its appearance at the left of the document window—but only if there’s room. If you’ve got the window pressed up against the left edge of your screen, for example, the drawer shoots out of the window’s right side instead.
Figure 2-2: Pull out the Styles Drawer to reveal your document’s styles: Choose View➝Show Styles Drawer, or click the Styles Drawer button (A) in the Format Bar. To apply a style, select some text and click the style you want from the Styles Drawer, or from the Format Bar’s Paragraph Style (B), Character Style (C), or List Style (D) pop-up menu.If you don’t see the Character or List panes in the drawer (or you do and wish you didn’t), click the Show/Hide buttons at the bottom-right corner of the drawer (E). Click the Add (+) button (F) and use its pop-up menu to create new styles from a selection. If you’ve amassed more styles than can fit in one of the Styles Drawer’s panes, a scroll bar appears. You can adjust the height of these panes by dragging the button marked with two horizontal lines (G) next to the Character and List styles headings. Adjust the width of the drawer by dragging its outside edge.
Pages divides the Styles Drawer into three panes, one for each of Pages’ three types of styles:
- Paragraph styles. These styles apply to entire paragraphs, letting you paint entire swaths of text with any combination of font, text, and paragraph formatting you might like. Use paragraph styles to shape the look of the major structural elements of your document: body text, headings, captions, footnotes, page headers and footers, and so on.
- Character styles. You apply these styles to text inside a paragraph, dressing up the underlying word-by-word style, or even the look of individual letters. Use character styles to emphasize a word, a sentence, or even a single character. These styles relate only to font and text formatting—typeface, size, color, and so on—and can’t be used to set paragraph formatting like line spacing, alignment, borders, and the like. You’ll typically use character styles for emphasis—you might create a “citation” style to italicize book titles, or an “our company” style to call out your company name in shadowed, electric-blue, 64-point text (you’re tacky, but at least you’re consistent).
- List styles. Pages uses list styles to help you build lists, formatting items with bullets or numbers depending on the style you choose. You could create one list style that uses a small red bullet, and another that uses a full-color image as the bullet—say, your logo. List styles apply to entire paragraphs.
Tip: The Styles Drawer always shows Paragraph styles, but you can show or hide the Character and List styles by clicking the buttons at the bottom of the drawer (Figure 2-2).
Applying Styles
You can apply styles by clicking them in the Styles Drawer, or by using the Paragraph Style, Character Style, or List Style pop-up menu buttons in the Format Bar. Both the drawer and the menus provide a preview of the font, color, and size of each style.
To apply a character style, highlight some text—for example drag across a word or two—and then click one of the character styles in the Styles Drawer. If there’s no selection and the insertion point rests inside a word, Pages applies the selection to the entire word.
To apply a paragraph style, click anywhere inside an existing paragraph, and choose a style; Pages applies the style to the text of the entire paragraph no matter how much or little of its text you’ve selected. If you have a selection that includes text from multiple paragraphs, the style will be applied to all those paragraphs.
You apply list styles in the same way: Highlight the paragraphs to be included in the list and then choose a list style. If you’re just beginning a list, choose your style first and then start typing the list.
Note: If you apply the same type of style to an element you’ve already formatted—for example, paragraph style—Pages replaces the first style with the new one. In other words, one paragraph style replaces another paragraph style. You can, however, create compound styles using the three different style types (paragraph, character, and list). You could, for example, create a numbered list where each item is formatted with a different paragraph style, and individual words within the paragraphs are formatted with a character style.
To remove a paragraph style, replace it with another style or replace it with the Free Form style—the default basic text style for the current template. Or, if you just applied a style, choose Edit➝Undo Paragraph Style to reverse your style change. Removing character styles or list styles works the same way—except you choose None in the Character and List panes of the Styles Drawer.
Tip: If you apply the same styles over and over again, save yourself some mousework by assigning those styles a hot key, a keyboard shortcut: Click the downward triangle next to the style, and choose Hot Key from the pop-up menu. Select the Function key to use for your keyboard shortcut (F1, for example), and the Styles Drawer shows the key next to the name of the style. From that point on, pressing that Function key applies the style to the selected text in the current document. (If you’re using a laptop, you may also need to hold down the fn key when you press the Function key.)
Style Overrides
Just because you’ve applied a style to some text, that doesn’t mean you can’t add additional formatting. You’re free to go ahead and apply italic, bold, or other character formatting to some of the words in the paragraph; or you can change the paragraph alignment, line spacing, background color, or other paragraph formatting options. When you apply any additional formatting on top of a style, you create a style override.
Pages uses the arrow to the right of a style’s name in the Styles Drawer to alert you that you’ve added a style override to the current selection. When the insertion point is inside a snippet with an override, the arrow turns from its normal gray to red.
If you have second thoughts about the changes you make in an override, you can return a paragraph to its basic style. Place your insertion point within the paragraph to select it, click the red arrow next to its style name in the Styles Drawer and choose Revert to Defined Style from the pop-up menu (or just double-click the style name). Pages removes the overrides, including any character styles, and returns all text in the paragraph to its original underlying style.
Creating Styles by Example
Whether you’re modifying an existing style or building a new one from scratch, Pages lets you “create by example”—in other words, you format the text in the document the way you want it to look and then tell Pages to memorize that formatting as a new style.
Modifying Existing Paragraph and List Styles
Paragraph and list styles both apply their formatting to entire paragraphs, and modifying either type of style involves the same process. The following steps use a paragraph style for the example, but you can use the same process to change a list style, too. To begin modifying a style, choose a paragraph in your document you’d like to see formatted with your new style, or just type a new paragraph so you have some text to work with.
1. Place your insertion point in the paragraph and choose View➝Show Styles Drawer, or click the Styles Drawer button in the Format Bar.
Pages presents the document’s styles collection.
2. Click the style that’s closest to the one you want to create, and Pages formats the selected paragraph in your chosen style.
3. Make all your modifications to the paragraph, tweaking the font, size, color, indentation, spacing, tabs, you name it.
You can use any of the character and paragraph formatting options described in Chapter 1. Mold the paragraph to your whim.
4. Click the arrow to the right of the current paragraph style in the Styles Drawer. The arrow is red, indicating you’ve applied style overrides.
The pop-up menu offers two ways to handle the new style you’ve created.
Choose Redefine Style from Selection, and Pages updates the original style you began with, stacking your modifications on top. When you choose this command, Pages also applies your freshly modified style to all occurrences of that style in the document so that they all match the formatting of your current text selection. In other words, you should redefine the style only if you have no more use for the old style.
Instead of updating the existing style, you can choose Create New Paragraph Style from Selection to create a brand new style based on your current text selection, without making any changes to the original style (or choose Create New List Style from Paragraph if that’s what you’re up to). Pages asks you to give the new style a name. If the “Apply this new style on creation” checkbox is turned on, Pages assigns the new style to the paragraph you’ve been modifying (usually what you want); turn off the checkbox and the paragraph retains its original style, with the style overrides you’ve added. Click OK and the new style appears in the Styles Drawer.
Creating New Paragraph and List Styles
The process for creating brand new styles from scratch is nearly identical to the one described above. Select a paragraph, and apply all your formatting modifications. When you’re satisfied with the result, click the + button at the bottom of the Styles Drawer. You can also Control-click the formatted text and choose Create New Paragraph Style from Selection.
Note: The + button defaults to creating a new paragraph style—when you give the + button a simple click, Pages gives you a new paragraph style. To get a new list style or character style, hold down the + button and make your choice from the pop-up menu, choosing “Create New Character Style from Selection”, for example.
Type a name for the new style and decide whether or not to apply it to the current paragraph by turning the checkbox for “Apply this new style on creation” on or off. Click OK, and Pages adds the new style to the Styles Drawer, now at your service to use anywhere in your document.
Modifying Existing Character Styles
Character styles let you format text inside a paragraph, supplementing the current paragraph style with additional text formatting to emphasize a word or phrase. Like paragraph styles above, you can define character styles by taking a “snapshot” of a selection and all its text attributes, or you can cherry-pick the relevant formatting.
For example, say that you’re creating a “Citation” style from a portion of text that just happens to be red italicized Courier, but you’re really only interested in making Pages remember the italic for your new style—you don’t want it to apply the red color and Courier font to every citation. In that case, you can tell Pages to ignore the color and font of the selection when it defines the style, so that the Citation style applies only the italic as the formatting, leaving the text with its original typeface and color. Here’s how it works:
1. Choose View➝Show Styles Drawer, or click the Styles Drawer button in the Format Bar.
If the Character Styles pane isn’t visible, click the Show Character Styles button at the bottom-right of the Styles Drawer to reveal it.
2. Select some words in a paragraph, or type some new text and select it.
3. Click the character style closest to the style you want to create.
4. Apply all the character formatting attributes that you want to the selected text: font, size, color, bold, italic, strikethrough, and so on.
You can apply any of the formatting described in “Changing Font Styles and Appearance” in Chapter 1. As you apply the first of these style overrides to your selected characters, the arrow next to the style’s name in the Styles Drawer turns red.
5. Click the red arrow and choose Create New Character Style from Selection to create a brand-new style. (Skip down to Step 8 if you want to choose Redefine Style From Selection.)
Pages displays the New Character Style dialog box.
6. Give your new style a name, and then click the flippy triangle labeled “Include all character attributes” to reveal the checklist of attributes for this style (Figure 2-3).
Figure 2-3: The “New character style” sheet appears when you select Create New Character Style from Selection via the Add (+) button in the Styles Drawer, or the downward-pointing triangle next to a character style’s name. Click the flippy triangle next to “Include these character attributes” to reveal the on/off switches for the various character formatting attributes you’re about to include in your new style. Turn off the checkboxes for any attributes you don’t want to include. Use the Select All or Deselect All buttons to make your checking and unchecking task simpler. Click the Select Overrides button to see only the attributes you’ve modified—leave those items’ checkboxes turned on if you want your style to affect only those items when you apply the style.
When it opens, every checkbox is turned on, which would define the style as an exact snapshot of your current selection—applying the new style will paint text with the exact same font, color, size, everything. If only certain aspects of the formatting are relevant to this style, you can turn off some of them—apply all the character formatting except font color, for example, or only the italic text.
7. Choose whether or not to apply this new style to the selected text using the checkbox at the bottom of the window, and then click OK.
Pages memorizes all this character formatting information and your style’s new name shows up in the Character Styles pane of the Styles Drawer.
8. Or choose Redefine Style from Selection in Step 5, to incorporate all your new formatting into the style you began with.
Choose to redefine the style only if you don’t need any of the original style’s formatting in your document—Pages transforms any existing instances of that style into your freshly defined style.
Creating New Character Styles
To create your own character style from scratch, select some text and make your character formatting modifications, just like in the previous example. When you’re happy with the result, click the Add (+) button at the bottom of the Styles Drawer and, from the pop-up menu, choose Create New Character Style from Selection.
Continue on with steps 6 and 7 from the previous section, to complete the character style creation process.
Finding and Copying Styles
When you’re working on a long document, just finding every occurrence of a style can be a challenge. Imagine you want to replace one style with another—for example, replacing a headline style with a new larger headline style and then using the existing headline style for your subheadings. In this case you wouldn’t want to modify the existing style because you need to keep it to use in different places. Instead, Pages can find and highlight all the occurrences of a given style in your document—and then, with one click, you can apply a different style to those occurrences.
To do so, choose View➝Show Styles Drawer and click the downward-pointing arrow next to the name of the style you want to replace. (Those arrows don’t appear until you point to the style name.) From the pop-up menu, choose “Select All Uses of [style name]”. Pages highlights all the occurrences of this style in your text. Click the name of any other style in the Styles Drawer, and Pages does the formatting switcheroo.
If you instead prefer to hop to individual instances of a style one by one, you can do that using the upward and downward arrows at the bottom of the document window. First choose the style you want to find from the neighboring gear-shaped Action pop-up menu, then click the downward arrow to jump to the next occurrence of the style; click the upward arrow to go to the previous occurrence.
Copying Styles
You don’t necessarily have to have a style saved in the Styles Drawer in order to reuse style formatting in your text. You can also copy and paste paragraph and character formatting styles using commands in the Format menu. Unlike the normal copy-and-paste maneuver, copying a style doesn’t copy the text of your selection, only its underlying formatting. To copy a paragraph style, place your insertion point anywhere within the paragraph and choose Format➝Copy Paragraph Style; to copy a character style, select some formatted text and choose Format➝Copy Character Style. Then place your insertion point in another paragraph or select some text you wish to style and choose Format➝Paste Paragraph Style (or Format ➝Paste Character Style). Shazam! The text takes on the formatting of the pasted style, while the words themselves remains unchanged. This technique copies not only the style, but also any style overrides (“Style Overrides”) that you’ve applied to the paragraph or character.
Better yet, you can copy and paste styles between documents. In other words you can pick and choose styles from any of your Pages documents and paste them into another document. Not only does this technique reformat the selected text in the document, but Pages adds the pasted style to the Styles Drawer, making it available for formatting any other parts of the document.
Importing Styles from Another Document
When you have several styles to copy from another document, the copy/paste technique gets to be a ton of work. Consider instead importing some or all those styles in one fell swoop, making it easy to give related documents a similar look and feel.
1. Choose Format➝Import Styles to import styles into your document.
The Open dialog box appears.
2. Navigate to the Pages document containing the styles you want to import, and double-click its title (or select the title and click Open).
Pages displays a window listing all the styles in the document, as shown in Figure 2-4.
Note: If you import a document created by Microsoft Word or AppleWorks, Pages imports the styles contained in those documents as well. They show up in the Styles Drawer alongside Pages’ styles.
Figure 2-4: Choose Format➝Import Styles and select one of your Pages documents in order to import its styles into the current document. Pages displays this Import Styles dialog box from which you can pick and choose the styles you’d like to import—or just choose Select All to bring them all in. Be careful with the “Replace duplicates” checkbox. When it’s turned on, Pages replaces same-named styles in your Styles Drawer and modifies the text in your document wherever you’ve used those styles.
3. Use the scroll bar to view all the styles. Press ⌘ while you click to select several styles. Or, to import all the styles, click Select All. Click OK, and Pages performs the import.
If you turn on the checkbox for “Replace duplicates,” Pages replaces the styles in your document with those it’s importing that have the same name. If you don’t turn on the checkbox for Replace duplicates, then when Pages imports styles with the same name, it adds a number to the name of the imported style. For example, if you import a style named Headline into a document that already has a Headline style, Pages names the newly imported style Headline 2.
Warning: If you import styles with “Replace duplicates” turned on, not only does Pages replace those duplicate styles in the Styles Drawer, but it also reformats all occurrences of that style in the document. That’s handy when that’s what you’re after, but if not, you’ve got an unpleasant surprise on your hands when you scroll down your document to discover your carefully formatted subheads have somehow morphed into a different style.
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:
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 from Selection”.
5. Repeat step 4 for the Body style in the Paragraph Styles pane, and then update any of the other styles you’d like to customize.
6. Choose File➝Save as Template.
Give the template a name and then click Save.
Your newly minted template appears in the Template Chooser window in the category “My Templates,” ready to take the Blank template’s place as your new starting point.