Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here's some tips for writing in Pages.
MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 1000 supporters.
Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you can read more about the Patreon Campaign.
Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts.
So when using Pages to write we often concentrate too much on the final product. How it's going to
look when distributed as a PDF or printed out. But before we even get to that point we've got
to write the content of that document. It can be useful to divide things into two parts. The
first part being the writing and then after that formatting things for others to read.
First, you don't want the text to be too small. I think by default if the text is too small
on the screen. It may be good for reading but for actually writing it and crafting
the words and sentences you may want it to be a little bit bigger. Now you can change
the font size but the easy thing to do is to go to Zoom right here and increase the size.
Then you could see how much space you've got in the left and right here and maybe even go
more than that. So here I could go to 200% and still easily fit all of the text on the screen.
Now the next thing you might want to do is choose a different font. Now this is a very personal
preference. Different people like different fonts for writing. But concentrate on your preference
when you're writing. Worry about how you want the document to look for people to read it later on.
So by default here, if I select all the text, I can look on the right side and see the default
is Helvetica Neue. Now some people may like that. But there are lots of other choices. For instance,
other people swear by Arial as a better font for writing. Others like other fonts. Verdana is one
that is often mentioned. Also, you may want to go with a Serif font like, for instance,
just using the standard Times or Times New Roman. A lot of people, myself included, like Monospaced
fonts for writing. Maybe it's because I'm a coder. So using Courier, or Courier New like this
or, my favorite is font Menlo. To me I can really clearly see what I'm writing now and craft things
a little bit better. But I would never leave it as Menlo when I'm finished with the document.
Now while writing it's important to use Styles and not to custom set the fonts everywhere.
For instance, say I'm going to put a Heading right here. Now I could go and select that. Make
it Bold. Make a larger font size. The problem with that is that if I use that a whole bunch
of different times I have all these different places in the text where it's considered BodyText,
you could see it right here it's Body, but yet it's actually a Heading. So when I'm done my
fifty page document now I have to go and change all those manually. However, if I stick with using
the Styles and make this say Heading like that and then every time I put a heading
I use Heading and every time I'm using Body Text is use Body, I just use all of these.
Now it's going to be easy to update things. So, for instance, if I have two headings here
and I set this to be a heading as well and now let's say I'm finishing up the document and I want
to make these something really good here. So I can select it and set the font to something else,
let's set it to Times New Roman here and let's make it a little bit smaller,
and maybe change the Style a little bit. Now I can go over here and hit Update
and notice it updated all of the Headings, not just that one.
So while writing certainly change things. Like changing the font here of this Body Text
paragraph to Arial but Update and then that changes Body to be Arial.
So now anytime I want to change all the Body Text I can go and select just one paragraph
of Body Text, change it to something else like make it a little bit bigger, hit Update,
and you could see Body Text changes everywhere. So it's important to stick to Styles and never
individually set any words or paragraphs to special fonts and sizes or other things.
If you like how you setup all your styles here for writing before you change everything for the
finished document good for reading, save a copy. Then in that copy you could select everything,
get rid of all the text but all the styles are still there. Then you could go to File,
and then Save As Template. You could save this as a custom writing template in the Template Chooser
so the next time you start writing a document you could start with one that has
Body Text, Headings, and all the other styles set like you want for writing.
So another reason it's important to use Styles for things like Headings is now you can use
Table of Contents View. This is different than Table of Contents which is something you see in
your document. This is a special View over here. Click this and instead of Document
Only or Page Thumbnails which is what you might normally use like that, you can go to Table of
Contents View. Now what Table of Contents View is going to do is show you all of your Headings. You
can click one to jump to it. So if I had a Heading further down in the text, like let's say here,
and I set that to Heading Style, like that, you could see it appears there. I can click
in here to jump to any Heading. I could Edit. What's included in the
Table of Contents here only Heading is included. But I could include Heading 2,
Heading 3, if I want subheadings. So your Table of Contents View here on the left becomes a way
for you to quickly jump throughout your document. So if you have a long document, like a long report
that has tons of headings, instead of having to scroll through it and find things you can
just click on the Table of Contents here on the left and jump around to where you want.
Now perhaps the only tip out of all of these that I use every single time I'm writing in Pages
is to change the line spacing, particularly the paragraph spacing. So with the cursor
placed inside some body text here I'm going to go to Text, Style and go to Spacing here. Sure
I can change the line spacing and you may want to make it something a little bit bigger than just 1
so you have a little more separation and you can more easily see what you're writing.
But also change After Paragraph to create some spacing after the paragraph. So set it to 8 point
or 12 point or something like that. Now body text has been changed. So if I Update it will update
all of the rest of the body text. So notice here how the paragraphs have this nice spacing between
each one. I may not want to keep that when I'm finished with my document but for writing it's
really important to see exactly where you've got your paragraph breaks. Immediately see where
you've got, maybe, a paragraph that's a little bit too long or a bunch of short paragraphs in a row.
Now I want to show you something else with Table of Contents. Let's say you want to, every once in
a while, include a note somewhere in your text. Maybe something you're not sure that you want to
have in there. So you include something extra. You set this to a special style. Some I'm going
to select it here and let's change it. Maybe let's make the color a little bit different.
So I'm going to make it kind of an orange color there and make it italic like that. Maybe I'm
even going to go to Layout here and indent it a little bit like that. Maybe this is something I
might include or might not include or it's a note or something like that. I'm going to set
this up as a special style. So I'm going use the Plus button here and call this a note like that.
Now that's a special note and I can add another one somewhere else, like maybe further down
here. Maybe I'll change this paragraph here into a note like that. So now I've got these
notes that I'm adding in my text. Now I can go to Table of Contents View here and add Note as one
of the things it looks for. Now notice here I've got Heading 1, Heading 2, then there's that Note,
and then here's this other Note. So the Notes are now included in the Table of Contents View and I
can easily jump to them. You could even go in here and under Note I could indent that a little bit.
Another way to add notes is to insert either Highlights or Comments. So you can select a
word or group of words or a whole paragraph and then you can go to Insert and you could either
Highlight or Comment. So with a Highlight it will highlight the word there and it says there is one
highlight. I can actually click here and it gives me this whole other sidebar that shows all of my
Highlighted things. So I can select something else here and use the keyboard shortcut probably, Shift
Command H, to add another note. So now I've got these two notes. I could add comments right here
to these highlights. I can easily jump around to go to different
highlights and I could Hide this if I want. You could still see the highlights in here. Now
the Comments are similar but it immediately prompts you to add a comment and you have to add
a comment. If you don't add a comment then it just goes away. So you need to add something. Then you
could see it appears there just like a Highlight. So they are similar in a lot of ways. But Comments
require a comment whereas Highlights can just be words that are highlighted with no comment added
at all. Of course this is meant to be a tool that's collaborative when you're working with
other people. But you can use it when you're just working on your own to add notes for yourself.
Now another thing I find useful while writing is to go to View,
and then Show Invisibles. This will give you a blue dot where there's a space and a paragraph
mark every time you've got a return there. So, if I put an extra line there you could see
this isn't spacing between paragraphs, this is actually an extra return that's in there. You
also see things like Tabs and other invisible characters. For one thing it prevents me from
adding multiple spaces between words because you can clearly see when you've done that.
Often when we're writing you need to have a word count, either for all the words in the document
or a selection. You can get a word count by going to View, Show Word Count. Then it appears at the
bottom here. You can click on it and actually change it to Characters, Characters With or
Without Spaces, words, paragraphs, or number of pages. Now if you have nothing selected, just the
cursor blinking inside a paragraph, it's going to show you the total number of words. But if
you select some text it will show you the number of words in that selection. So you can use this
to see, say, how many words you've written today by selecting the text that you've written today.
Finally, I think it's important to have a really clean writing environment. So you may want to
get rid of a lot of the extra stuff around here when you're actually writing. You can Hide the
format bar, for instance. You can, of course, Hide the sidebar here. Go with Document Only.
You can go to View and then Hide the Toolbar like that. You can click the green button here
to go to Full Screen. Get rid of the Menu Bar except it's still there when you go to the top.
This gives me even more room here to actually zoom in even further and make the words even
larger. If you want to go even more extreme you can change the font color to white
and the background color for the Pages document to black to be writing white text on black.
One last thing I want to show you here. Notice how because I have Spellcheck on, under Edit,
Spelling and Grammar, and then Check Spelling While Typing things like names are underlined
in red because Pages doesn't know the spelling of those names. If you want to get rid of those
it's pretty easy. Just Control Click, right click, or two finger click on a trackpad and
either choose Ignore Spelling to ignore the spelling for that, or Learn Spelling,
so it adds that to the dictionary. Let's do it for here, Learn Spelling, and now
that name will no longer be underlined in red throughout my entire document.
So I hope you found these tips useful. Thanks for watching.