Publishing with iBooks Author

Chapter 3. Text

The first thing you’re probably going to want to add to your book is some text. Author is a powerful text editor (a lot like Apple’s Pages) with the full gamut of text formatting tools. You can click the placeholder text and type away, or you can import your content from a Word or Pages file.

Placeholder Text

Whenever you add new pages, Author prefills them with placeholder text, to give you a sense of how the pages will look when you’re done. Click once on any stretch of placeholder text, and Author selects the whole thing for you to overwrite with your own masterpiece.

If you start typing a sentence and realize you’re not actually ready to write that part yet, you can retag it as placeholder text for easy editing later on. Select the string of text you want to turn into a placeholder, and go to Format → Advanced → Define as Placeholder Text. Author won’t let you tag fields (see Text Variables) or linked text as placeholders, however, including any sentence or passage that has a glossary term or index link in it.

Importing a Text File

Choose Insert → Chapter from Pages or Word document... to insert a document you’ve already written into your Author project. When you choose the file you want to import, Author asks you what kind of layout you want it to have; choose one of the options, and Author inserts a new section using the layout you chose, filled with your document. Author will use the document filename as the title of the chapter or section, which you’ll likely ...