iWork '09: The Missing Manual

Working with Objects

As you’ve explored the ins and outs of adding pictures, text, shapes, audio, and video, you’ve no doubt noticed the similarities in how all these objects work. While the content of these object types may be very different, they share many of the same properties and behaviors as object-level building blocks that you stack, organize, and resize in your document. Whether an object contains a movie or a text passage, the methods you use to juggle it on the page, wrap text around it, poke it, and prod it are the same. This chapter has touched on many of those methods in passing, but now you’ll dig into the details.

Selecting Objects

Select an object by clicking it once. The object’s outline appears, fully loaded with selection handles—in objectland, this is the equivalent of standing at attention. The outline and selection handles also tell you whether the object is floating (eight open black squares), inline (three open black squares), a group (blue outline), locked on the page (eight gray X marks), or a master object (eight solid blue squares).

Here’s the tricky bit: There’s a difference between selecting the object—the box that contains the content—and the content itself. That means that most object types have two editing modes, one for editing its object-level characteristics (size, position, border, rotation, and so on) and another for editing the content within (text, image mask, table cells, and the like). When you’ve got an object selected at the content level, ...