Chapter 2. Formatting Your Document

Composing basic text documents on your computer dramatically morphed into desktop publishing in 1985. Magic happened that year when publishers big and small loaded up the new Macintosh with Aldus PageMaker software and connected the whole rig to the even newer PostScript laser printers. Suddenly anyone could create and print formatted text documents. No longer did you need a typesetting machine to produce beautiful (or dreadful) pages containing fonts of different sizes and styles. Done with panache or with amateurish abandon, formatting is what separates modern computer word processing from Remingtons, Underwoods, and WordPerfect for DOS. This chapter covers everything you need to know about formatting your documents and introduces you to Pages' built-in spell checker.