iWorks Pages program is not only a pretty good word processor, but it also has a pretty good Page layout system with it. I was working with Pages when it fell on me to produce a newsletter for a group I work with. I am pretty good with Pagemaker, but Adobe is now using inDesign as the page layout program among other things. I discovered that Pages had a page layout mode, and how to use this mode is after the Break.
To use page layout mode you have to create a page layout file. Create a new document and from the page layout section of the template chooser choose one of the templates. For this example I chose blank and the portrait orientation. When the document opens it is completely blank. You can’t click on it to enter text. Everything has to be in a text box. Click on the text box from he toolbar, and you will get a text box in the middle of the page.
With this text box, click and drag it to the left hand side of the page. Click on the text box button, a second text box is now created. These two text boxes know nothing about each other, they are not connected. If you flow text into one back it will not flow into the second text box. We have to join them together. Notice on the text box that there are two blue boxes with triangles. The top left one is the entrance, and the bottom right one is the exit. When you paste text into a box it will fill up the visible area, and then flow into another text box as long as you have connected them together.
To connect two boxes that are on the document, but not connected click on the lower right blue triangle of the source box. Then click on the text box that you want to connect. This will join them together.
Pages now allows you to select both of these boxes together. Another way to create two joined boxes it to creat one and then click the bottom right blue triangle and then click on the document background. This will create a text box joined to the first box.
This idea of using text boxes to control the flow of text in a document was first used in PageMaker. You can tell when there is more text available because there is a plus at the bottom of the text box. You can resize the text boxes to show more text, or you can chain another text box to show more text.
I don’t recommend writing in a page layout document. Use a text editor, or Pages word processing documents. Copy the text to the clipboard, and then paste the text into the first text box. Using this technique you will produce page layout documents that will have that professional look in no time.
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