iWork: The Missing Manual

Chapter 5. Formatting and Organizing Documents

The last few chapters focused on editing and formatting your prose, with an eye on refining the details of your document at the word, sentence, and paragraph level. This chapter takes the big-picture view, turning to the layout and organization of your entire document. That includes nitty-gritty housekeeping tasks like setting page margins, headers, footnotes, and page size, and the grander architectural work of dividing hard-to-swallow blocks of text into more manageable columns and creating a table of contents. These features benefit both you and your readers, making it easy for everyone to navigate your text.

As you’ll see, most of Pages’ document-management tools—such as page numbering and tables of contents—are geared toward longer documents. However, some of the options you’ll encounter throughout this chapter, like protecting your document with a password or adding hyperlinks, come in handy for documents of all sizes.

This chapter covers all these advanced organizational issues and more, but first, you’ll dip a toe in the waters with some basic page formatting.

Document Formatting

The overall layout of an individual page—and your entire document—depends on what’s known as document formatting. This high-level formatting determines how Pages handles things like your document’s page margins, hyphenation, and footnotes.

To change document formatting, use the aptly named Document tab. At the right end of Pages’ toolbar, click the Setup ...