iWork '09: The Missing Manual

Style Central: Meet the Styles Drawer

Pages stashes your document styles in the Styles Drawer, a special panel that glides in and out from the side of your document window. Click View → Show Styles Drawer to slide it out, or click the Styles Drawer button in the Format Bar—the one shaped like a paragraph symbol (see Figure 3-2). To tuck it away again, click View → Hide Styles Drawer, or click the Styles Drawer button again.

Note

The Styles Drawer typically makes its appearance at the left of the document window—but only if there’s room. If you’ve got the window pressed up against the left edge of your screen, for example, the drawer shoots out of the window’s right side instead.

Pages divides the Styles Drawer into three panes, one for each of Pages’ three types of styles:

• Paragraph styles. These styles apply to entire paragraphs, letting you paint entire swaths of text with any combination of font, text, and paragraph formatting you might like. Use paragraph styles to shape the look of the major structural elements of your document: body text, headings, captions, footnotes, page headers and footers, and so on.

• Character styles. You apply these styles to text inside a paragraph, dressing up the underlying word-by-word style, or even the look of individual letters. Use character styles to emphasize a word, a sentence, or even a single character. These styles relate only to font and text formatting—typeface, size, color, and so on—and can’t be used to set paragraph formatting like line ...