iWork '09: The Missing Manual

Chapter 5. Document Format and Organization

The last few chapters have focused on editing and formatting your prose, with an eye to refining the details of your document at the level of words, sentences, and paragraphs. This chapter takes the big-picture view, turning to the layout and organization of your entire document. That means nitty-gritty housekeeping tasks like setting page margins, headers, or footnotes, and it also involves the grander architectural work of building an outline, organizing content sections, or varying your layout rhythm with multiple columns.

As you’ll see, most of Pages’ document-management tools aim to help you with longer word-processing documents. Although some of these options, like mail merge, come in handy for short files or page-layout documents, most find their best use managing lengthy texts or complex documents that vary their layouts from section to section. These features benefit your readers, too, making it easy for you to help them navigate your text with tables of contents or, for onscreen browsing, with bookmarks and hyperlinks.

This chapter covers all those advanced organizational issues and more, but you’ll ease in with some basic page formatting.