Formatting text and using images in Pages

 earn about text-wrapping, columns, styles and more....

 WORD PROCESSING HAS COME A LONG WAY IN

a short space of time. Early word processors were little more than digital typewriters, but in recent years they've increasingly borrowed from desktop-publishing software. Creating documents is more than choosing a font - users demand the ability to work with images, structure a document both semantically and visually, and create something that looks great.

Pages for iPad includes a number of features that enable you to giveyourwork some professional-looking visual punch. First and foremost, built-in styles enable you to use titles, headings, bullets and captions to structure your document and keep text looking consistent throughout. For those occasions where something needs to stand out, you can override colours and fonts.

Images, too, are a big part of Pages. You can drop images stored in the Photos app into Pages documents, and once you've inserted an image, it can be resized, scaled within its boundaries via a double-tap and slider combo, and rotated by a tap-hold and use of a second finger. Importantly, you can also define how text and images interact, adjusting text-wrapping in several different ways.

The walkthrough covers all these things, along with creating columns of text. Our example is pretty basic from a layout standpoint, but that's intentional -we're providing you with the building blocks. Once you've mastered them you should be able to create increasingly elaborate documents. Also, remember to experiment with Pages templates for layout ideas and extra styles.



KIT LIST:

■ iPad

■ Pages for iPad

Time required: 10 mins
Difficulty: Beginner

 The Navigator

To preview and quickly access pages in large documents tap-hold the right of the screen, This brings up the Navigator. Drag to preview and let go to jump to a page.

Using images

Photos and images stored on your iPad are easily added to Pages documents and manipulated via touch-based gestures.

Export your work

Using the 'Share' button on the 'My Documents' screen, you can email or export the current document in one of three formats: Pages, PDF or Word.

 1 Grab some text If you don't have any text to use in your document, open Safari, head to lipsum.com and create and copy a few paragraphs of placeholder text.

 2 Create a new document in Pages, create a new document using the Blank template. Tap anywhere on the page and select 'Paste' from the pop-up to paste your text.

 3 Add an image Tap the Insert menu and select an image from the 'Media' tab. It will be added to your document, roughly wherever the insert pointer was positioned.

 4 Resize the image Tap the image and drag the bottom-left drag handle right and up. As the image reduces in size, its dimensions are shown and text automatically reflows around it.

 5 Turn off text-wrapping To stop text wrapping around an image, select the image, tap the Info menu, select the 'Arrange' tab and choose 'Above and Below' from the 'Wrap' sub-menu

 6 Try columns If you'd like to reformat text Into columns, select it and then tap the Info menu. In the 'Layout'tab, select the number of columns you'd like and Pages reflows your text.

 7 Utilise styles Although you can change the appearance of text via the 'Style' tab ofthe Info menu, use predefined styles for a title, headings and captions to keep your work consistent.

 Looking good

 Because Apple is interested in how your work comes across visually, rather than just the content, the iWork apps share various capabilities, including an ability to create tables. Of course, some apps are more suited to certain tasks. Note therefore that to put a chart into a Pages document, it may be easiest to work in Numbers. Start with a form and use this to populate a table that can be turned into a chart. You can then copy the chart in Numbers and paste it into your Pages document.

8 Edit document settings Select  'Document Setup' from the Tools menu to amend global settings, including the header and footer size, document margins and paper size.