Even More Formatting Fun with Pages

By Kevin Shaw, 4 September, 2021

In my first Pages guide, I described what certain typographic elements looked like such as bold text and underlining. In my second guide, I provided a crash course in how you can quickly apply styles in your Pages documents. In this guide, let’s tackle some more complex concepts. You can apply these to the test document available in my second guide, or use one of yours as a playground.

Switching Cases

Capital letters are visually distinct from their small counterparts. They all occupy the same height in a line of text. These are also called upper case letters as typesetters used to keep the capital letters in the upper case of their printing presses when text used to be set by hand. Writing all of your body text in all caps is the visual equivalent to shouting your words at your reader. This is often seen as tacky or just plain rude in school and work settings.

This being said, all caps can look very sharp in a heading or a title as it gives your words a uniform height. They can also be inaccessible to those with low vision and print disabilities, so use this sparingly. Acronyms and initialisms are typically in all caps, such as NASA or DNA

Another smart look is small caps where the entire word is in capital letters, but the first capital letter is slightly bigger than the others. This looks very sharp in titles and headings and may help some people with low vision distinguish the letters more easily.

To change the case of letters in Pages:

  1. Highlight the words or paragraph to change.
  2. Edit menu; Transformations>
    • Make Upper Case: Makes all the letters capitals.
    • Make Lower Case: Makes all the letters small. Useful for when someone accidentally sends you text in all caps.
    • Capitalize: Capitalizes the first letter of each word.

Second Method:

  1. Highlight text.
  2. Move to the Text Formatter.
  3. Navigate to Show Advanced Options and activate.
  4. From the capitalization dropdown, choose the desired case.
  5. Close the Show Advanced Options screen with escape.
  6. Return to your body text.

This second method is different than the first. Your text will read as if it’s in whatever case you wrote it in, but be visibly changed on screen. This may be helpful when VoiceOver spells out a capitalized word instead of reading the word as a word.

Tracking

If you’re a braille reader, braille itself would be considered a monospaced font. This means the space for each cell is exactly the same, just as a typewriter uses monospaced type. Most typefaces on a Mac are proportionally spaced. This means the spacing between each letter differs slightly.

Tracking or character spacing) refers to the space between letters on a line of text. Kerning describes the space between individual letters. Tracking is described as loose (spaced out) or tight (squished closer together). This can be visually appealing or save space, but tight tracking can be inaccessible to people with low vision or print disabilities. Some people may try to space letters apart in a word by adding spaces in between each letter, but this not only looks tacky, it’s not very friendly to VoiceOver.

QUARTERLY REPORT (Regular spacing.)

Q U A R T E R L Y R E P O R T (The same words with spaces between each letter. Annoying to listen to and visually unappealing.)

Tracking achieves the same effect without adding the annoying spaces for loose text. Tightening text can be used to save space if a headline or title breaks over a line. This is very useful if you are using a very large font and don’t want a short word to be alone on the line below.

Low Information Music in a High Information

World

Here, the line breaks before the end of the title.

Low Information Music in a High Information World

(The result when the same font size is tightened, but this varies by font.)

To adjust tracking do the following:

  1. Highlight text.
  2. Format menu>Font>Character Spacing>
    • Tighten moves the letters closer to gather.
    • Loosen moves the letters further apart.
    • Use none returns the letters to their normal spacing.

Second Method:

  1. Highlight text.
  2. Move to the formatter.
  3. Move to the Show Advanced Options panel.
  4. Move to Character Spacing and adjust.
  5. Return to the body of your document.

Colour

Generally, the rule for colour is to use it sparingly. Unfortunately, Pages doesn’t read back colour information when using VO-T, but you can set this in the formatter. It’s often a good idea to set colours last when you update styles. You might wish to use colours to reflect the tone of your document. For example, a red heading can stand out visually if the rest of the text is black. It’s always a good idea to check on using colour in work or school settings. Colour and accessibility are also concerns and you may be making a document inaccessible to someone with colour blindness if you use it improperly. I typically leave others to fiddle with colour once I’ve finished with the document, but you are free to experiment.

Colours can be found by moving to the Text Formatter.

Ligatures

Ligatures go back to the days of typesetting where common combinations of character such as fl and fi were combined onto a single dye to save space on the typesetter’s press. The letters themselves look as if they’re glued together. This is very common in publishing as it gives a fancy look to words like first and flower. If you’ve used Pages before, you’ve used ligatures without knowing it as it is turned on by default.

One problem with ligatures is that they can mess up OCR software and be difficult for people with print disabilities to read. There is no harm in leaving this on, but if you need to turn it off:

Format menu>Font>Ligature>Use None.

Drop Caps

When typesetting, printers would use a very large initial letter for a paragraph, often in an ornate font to set off a chapter. This letter would be set to the left side of a paragraph and be three or four lines high. This looks very fancy for fiction documents, poetry, collections of essays and biographies. Unfortunately, VoiceOver doesn’t respect the drop cap, so put this in last and only once per chapter or document.

To use drop caps:

  1. Move to the Text Formatter and interact.
  2. Find the Drop Cap Preset button and activate it.
  3. Select from one of the presets.

Drop caps can have the text around them “hug” the shape of the letter (contour text wrapping), or appear with a ruled edge to the right of the drop cap. You can set this to none if you find VoiceOver performance too inconsistent when reading the paragraph with the drop cap.

Unordered Lists

Bullet lists are very common. You’ve been reading them this whole time. The bullet itself appears as a small black circle to the left of the text in the list. The text to the right is lined up at an equal distance from the bullet. This looks very neat on the left side.

You can instantly create a bullet list by pressing option-8, a space and then typing the first item in the list. Pressing return automatically formats the first line as the first item in your bullet list and puts you on the second line of the bullet list. When you’re done, simply press Return twice to get out of the list and return to your body paragraph style.

Bullets are for unordered lists. These don’t have to be black circles. They can be stars, squares, triangles, flower shapes, empty circles, diamonds or other shapes that match the style and tone of your document. If you’re using fancy bullets, make sure they are all consistent throughout your document. It’s best to make the bullet list with regular bullets first, then format the bullets when you format the rest of your document. This is surprisingly accessible.

To make fancy bullets

  1. Highlight your regularly formatted bullets. Alternatively, update the list style as described in my prior guide.
  2. Move to the Text Formatter.
  3. Navigate to the Choose a List Style menu. You may hear VoiceOver just read “Paragraph Styles” as you navigate past the paragraph spacing options.
  4. Activate this and you’ll be presented with a set of list styles.
  5. Select Bullet, Bullet Big or Image. This window will close.
  6. VO-right and move past the Drop Cap menu until you arrive at a combo box called Bullet Type. Selecting Image bullets may land you on a scroll area to interact with.
  7. Each bullet has a very comprehensive description of what it looks like. Select one.
  8. Return to the body of your document.

You may wish to copy and paste the formatting of this list or save it as a preset in the list styles. Like paragraph styles, these can receive a keyboard shortcut.

Ordered Lists

Ordered lists are usually preceded by a number: 1, 2, 3…. This can be any other type of ordered indicator such as small letters: a, b, c…, capitals: A, B, C…, Roman numerals: I, II, III, IV… and small Roman letters, I, ii, iii, iv….

Pages will automatically format your list by typing a letter, number or Roman I for the first item followed by a period, a space and the first item in the list. Press Return to continue the list and double press return to exit the list when you’re done.

1. Bananas

2. Corn

3. Lemons

A. Mozart

B. Beethoven

C. J.S. Bach

You can find more advanced list controls in the Text Formatter in the same way you did for unordered lists. This includes controls for varying the space between the bullet, number or letter and the text that comes after it.

In the next guide, I’ll discuss margins, headers, footers and the document inspector. Thanks for reading. Please feel free to leave a question or comment.

Click here to go to Part 4.

Disclaimer

The article on this page has generously been submitted by a member of the AppleVis community. As AppleVis is a community-powered website, we make no guarantee, either express or implied, of the accuracy or completeness of the information.

Options

Comments

Start an ordered list by typing the first number, letter or Roman numeral followed by period and a space. Type out the list item and press return. The list will continue.

If you want to create a sublist, press tab on a new line. Pages will start counting from 1 and add nested items. To return to the parent list, press return, then Command-[ (left bracket). VoiceOver will announce you are returning to the previous list level. Double press return to exit the list as normal.

You can return to the nested list, highlight and then use the Text Formatter to change the way the nested list appears. For example, letters followed by a right parenthesis, lower case Roman numerals followed by a period and so on. I've mocked up an example.

Movies

1. Action

A) Die Hard

B) The Expendables

C) Enemy of the State

2. Comedy

i. Animal House

ii. Borat

iii. The Princess Bride

Lists deserve their own guide altogether as Pages is very sophisticated.

By Jimmy on Wednesday, August 23, 2023 - 10:20

Could you please show me how to create an ordered list with the items separated by paragraphs of body text? When I press return twice to finish a list, Pages seems to refuse to start a new list from any number other than 1. In the example below, I cannot begin a new ordered list starting from item #3.

The text below is an example.

Students have to follow these steps for submission:
1. Email the proposal to your supervisor
2. Have your proposal double-checked by a second professor
Nb: If the second professor checker deems your draft necessary for a full review, you must review and address all comments raised, then start over from step one before continue.
3. Send your proposal to the committee for approval.

Thanks!

By Kevin Shaw on Wednesday, August 23, 2023 - 10:20

Here are steps to producing the results you're looking for:

  1. Start the list by typing 1 followed by a period and space, then the copy. Press return.
  2. Add your list items.
  3. When finished, return to the line you don't want as part of the list and highlight.
  4. Move to the formatting inspector.
  5. Move to the text formatter. Interact.
  6. Navigate to the dropdown to edit the type of bullets you want for this particular entry. It will say "Numbers, popup button".
  7. Select "No Bullets."

This will omit the number beside your entry and keep the sequence of numbers in the overall list. The result will look like the example you provided.

By Jimmy on Wednesday, August 23, 2023 - 10:20

Yes, it does work. Thank you very much for the suggestion.
I'd love to push it just a little further, although I don't need to use it right at the moment being 😜.

Say, I'd love to number section titles, with each item followed by its subsequent content. The section content may contain long swaths of text with many paragraphs. What would you say is the simplest way to do this without having to finish everything and manually populating the numbered section titles at the very last step?
I know using headings and other paragraph styles is the recommended approach for accessibility reason, but let's say it's a quirky point in my uni style guide I need to follow at least for now 😜.

When I needed to write some 100 pages for the dissertation, say, it would be such a pain to have to do this manually at the end 💩. I wonder why Pages didn't have a function similar to Word, where the auto-correct function would yield to my actual typing and number the list item accordingly, regardless of the position it is. Ie, no matter where I am in the document, if I type in number 3 followed by a full stop and space, Word will understand and create a list and number it according to the one I just typed.

Sorry Kevin for being such a pain.

Cheers!

By Kevin Shaw on Wednesday, August 23, 2023 - 10:20

I covered this in a recent guide on Pages which is now up in the guides section of AppleVis.

As you write your dissertation, simply choose Insert menu and then Section. You will be on a new page that starts a new section in the document. This is the easiest way to do this and keep the semantic formatting as you go. Having written a thesis myself, this is actually very handy as it allows you to organize your paper in an efficient manner.

As for lists, the Apple philosophy is that a new list always starts at 1 unless you specify otherwise.

Here is the new guide:
https://www.applevis.com/guides/adding-polish-your-pages-documents

By Ekaj on Wednesday, August 23, 2023 - 10:20

Kevin, thanks for this well-written guide. I've used Pages before, but only briefly. I participated in a local writers workshop for several years. I'm still on their roster, but haven't gone in awhile due primarily to time constraints. But shortly after acquiring my first Mac in 2013 I started taking it to the workshops and using it for my writing. At first I just used my personal website to write things, as that is fully accessible with VoiceOver. But then I began writing the prompt answers using Pages and found it to work well also. It'll be interesting to see how all these things work in Braille. I have one of the NLS eReaders but am not yet fully up and running on there. I *think* I might be getting closer though.

By Maldalain on Wednesday, August 23, 2023 - 10:20

Thanks for the great guide.
Any idea how to resolve the issue when I export my Pages document to Microsoft Word document, it looks horrible and it hardly preserves a little bit of formatting I had made to the document with Pages. This saves me a lot of embarrassment with people I send the documents to.
Thanks for the guide again.

By Kevin Shaw on Wednesday, August 23, 2023 - 10:20

There are a couple of things to bear in mind when exporting to a Word document.

First, many formatting issues can be used by using fonts that are compatible with both Mac and Windows computers. By default, Pages uses Helvetica as its default font, however Word defaults to Cambria or Arial as its default font.

The styling of fonts can change the amount of space text takes up on a page. This is why formatting tends to be moved around when moving between Pages and Word. To fix this, you have a couple of options:
Option 1; Export your document in a compatible font such as Arial, Times New Roman or Palatino.
Option 2: Install Cambria from Microsoft onto your Mac. Installing fonts is fairly straight forward and there are tons of guides on how to do this online.

Next, use proper document markup. While your document may not look similar, between Mac and Windows computers, you will have the underlying semantics so someone can format the document correctly in Word on Windows or on another Mac.

Finally, avoid using the spacebar, tab or the return key to move text to where you want it to go. This always results in poor exporting. Use the widow and orphan controls, alignment controls or manipulate indents and tab stops.

By Maldalain on Saturday, September 23, 2023 - 10:20

Thanks for the great tutorial. Can we have all the three guides compiled in one downloadable document?