Features
Pages is both a word processor and a page layout application. Over 140 Apple-designed templates are included. When Pages is first opened, users are presented with a Template Chooser which allows them to start with a blank document or with a predesigned template – including a résumé, outline, school report, flyer, or envelope – that contains placeholder text and images which can be replaced by dragging and dropping photos from the Media Browser.
Each document window contains a toolbar, which gives one-click access to commonly used functions such as inserting objects (text boxes, shapes, tables, charts, and comments), uploading the document to iWork.com, and inserting additional pages. In addition, the document window contains a contextual format bar that allows one-click formatting of text and adjustments to images. When text is selected, the format bar enables users to choose fonts, text size and color, adjust line spacing and alignment. When an image is selected, the format bar displays tools to adjust opacity, show and hide shadow and reflection effects, and mask the image. A separate Inspector window provides almost all formatting options available for any element in the open document.
Beginning in iWork '08, word processing and page layout are two distinct modes. In word processing mode, Pages supports headers and footers, footnotes (which do not work within tables!), and outline and list creation. Users can collaborate with others on a document. Pages tracks changes by different users by displaying each person's edits in different colors. Users can also add comments alongside the document. In page layout mode, users have complete control over the position of objects on the page. Images and text can be placed anywhere on the canvas.
The Media Browser provides quick access to media of iTunes, iMovie, iPhoto, and Aperture. Users can drag and drop music, movies, and photos directly into Pages documents from the Media Browser window.
Pages has a number of other advanced writing tools. The "Full Screen" mode (introduced in OS X Lion) hides the menubar and toolbars, allowing users to focus on a single document without being distracted by other windows on the screen. Mail merge automatically populates custom fields with contact data from Address Book or from Numbers to create personalized documents. For example, if a user wants to send one letter to three different people, mail merge allows him to create a single document with placeholder fields that will be populated when printing. Tables and charts pasted from Numbers are automatically updated if the original spreadsheet is changed.
Pages can import some AppleWorks word processing documents and Microsoft Word documents (including Word 2007's Office Open XML format), and can export documents to rich text, PDF, EPUB and Microsoft Word DOC formats.
Simple and complex mathematical equations can be written for a Pages document with Mac OS X's Grapher, offering similar capabilities to Microsoft Equation Editor (plus 2D and 3D rendering tools only Grapher can use).
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Famous quotes containing the word features:
“The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph into a tree, has arrested us in an accustomed movement.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
““It looks as if
Some pallid thing had squashed its features flat
And its eyes shut with overeagerness
To see what people found so interesting
In one another, and had gone to sleep
Of its own stupid lack of understanding,
Or broken its white neck of mushroom stuff
Short off, and died against the windowpane.””
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“Each reader discovers for himself that, with respect to the simpler features of nature, succeeding poets have done little else than copy his similes.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)