Consider this case. The iWork Color Viewer has stopped displaying the icons that give a choice of various controls—color wheel, sliders, or the box of crayons. What do we do?
The solution is as follows:
- Click on the oblong button in the top-right corner of the Colors Viewer (Palette), it opens and closes the View options.
- You will find the same oblong button in many other windows on your Mac. Click on it to display the tools and options available. Click again if you don't need to see them and just want to carry on with your work.
- Trying out iWork may be the first time you've encountered the Colors Viewer. What we should remember is that it is available for many other applications on our Mac, for example, in TextEdit and even Stickies. If you don't see it in the toolbar or can't find it in the menus, try the keyboard shortcut Command + Shift + C.
- The crayon box at the top-right of the Colors Viewer gives a selection of preset colors with fancy names such as Licorice for black or Salmon for pink.
- To create a new color, click on the color wheel in the top left-hand corner and drag the little dot around.
- Click and hold in the rectangular color window (the color well) that now contains your new color, and drag the color down to the color palette at the bottom of the window to store it, if you intend to use it again.
- If you see a color or a color sequence that you like, for instance in one of the templates, store it in the palette to use it in your project.
- If you like a color in a photo, you can save it in the palette:
- In the Colors window, click on the color picker that looks like the search tool—the little magnifying glass.
- Click on the color that catches your eye.
- To save, click in the color well and drag the color to the palette.
- If for some reason the palette disappears—this happened to me once—click on the little round handle at the bottom and drag it down. The palette will reopen.
What are sliders for? Take for example the CMYK option. CMYK Sliders give you precise control over the colors in your document when printing in four-color mode—Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black (K for Key).
If you are preparing the document for commercial or professional printing, you can, for example, set the color of black text to true black.
To do so, set Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow to zero and Black to 100 percent.
The default black in Pages is a composite color that is a mix of different CMYK colors—it looks good on screen but in print it gets fuzzy. Changing the setting to 100 percent black gives your text crispness. Even if you are not going to print your project commercially, when you make PDFs from Pages, I suggest changing text to true black.
- The ProducingaCMYK-separatedPDFforaprofessionalprintshop recipe in Chapter 8, PDFsandProfessionalPrinting.