Section 4.1. Templates: Ready-to-Use Page Designs

4.1. Templates: Ready-to-Use Page Designs

For writers and page designers, nothing is at once so exciting and so frightening as the blank page. Thanks to Pages' templates, fear of the blank page is a thing of the past. Though you can start with a blank canvas when the creative juices are raging, don't be shy about reaching for one of the templates to give you a jump-start.

4.1.1. Tour of a Template

The next few pages present a Reader's Digest version of creating a document, using one of the templates. The rest of this chapter flushes out the topic in depth, and Chapter 7 covers modifying templates or creating your own from scratch.

Figure 4-1. With the Non-Profit Newsletter as the starting point, this document features in-line and fixed objects, masked and rotated pictures, text boxes, a background image, and master objectsalong with the standard word processing elements like headlines, columns , and a footer. This chapter shows how to create these and many other effects as you progress from simple word processing to sophisticated page layout.

Launch Pagesor if it's already running, choose File New .

The Template Chooser appears, home of the 40 predesigned templates courtesy of Appleand soon to be the filing cabinet for your own document templates.

Note: If you see a document page at this point instead of the Template Chooser, choose Pages Preferences, and then turn on the button for "Show Template Chooser dialog." Close the preferences window, close the document window, and then choose File New again. This time the Template Chooser should appear.

Choose the Family Newsletter by double-clicking its image (or by clicking once to select it, and then clicking Choose) .

The Template Chooser retracts and the newsletter document appears in its place (Figure 4-2).

Figure 4-2. Turn on Show Layout and Show Invisibles to deconstruct Pages' template documents. This page is divided into two layouts (Section 3.4), with one column above and three below the layout break. The two shaded sidebars are text boxes, as are two parts of the masthead. Four graphic images appear on the pageone is a background image behind the masthead's text. The cookie is an alpha-channel graphic, which allows the text to wrap around its shape (see Section 4.3.8).

If you're used to word processing with plain text, your first glimpse of one of Pages' carefully designed page layout templates can be a shocker. Although this eye-catching layout looks to be the product of a skilled designer using a professional page layout program like InDesign or Quark, it's actually created in Pages using many of the page layout techniques already described.

Apple's designers created this document using columns, a layout break, text boxes, shapes containing text, and four graphics (Figure 4-2). To see how they did it, choose View Show Layout, and View Show Invisibles.

The layout outlines reveal that the upper portion of the document is one column wide and the bottom part is three columns. The red box on the left and the "cookie recipe" box across the bottom are shapes with text (see Section 4.2.4.4). Less obvious text boxes are the "the" of "the Johnson family" and the text banner immediately beneath that headline.

The pictures of the people jumping in the lake, the house, and the cookie are JPEG graphics files, as is the blue flowered background behind the headline.

UP TO SPEED
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Besides the design, the first thing you'll notice about this template is that the Johnson family must live in ancient Rome. Actually, the text in this templateand in all Pages templatesis placeholder text , intended to be replaced by whatever text you wish to place there. Typesetters call this kind of placeholder "Greek text"even though the standard filler's derived not from Greek but from a 2000yearold Latin treatise on ethics by Cicero, de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (The Extremes of Good and Evil) .

Designers use this dummy text when creating layouts so that (non-Latin) readers aren't distracted by the text's contentbut instead pay attention to the page design. This practice goes back to the 1500s when it first appeared in a type specimen bookand it continues, using that same chunk of text, to this day.

With Invisibles turned on, you can see how the layout break provides for the change from one to three columns; the section break ends the flow of text in the third column; and the column breaks divide up the columns in the cookie recipe box.

4.1.1.1. Adding template pages

Most Pages templates contain several page layouts, designed to match and work together in the particular document you're creating. If you design a newsletter, for example, you probably want a front page that shows the headlines and masthead, a variety of inner pages designed differently, and perhaps a back page that allows you to fold and mail the newsletter without an envelope. This, in fact, is exactly what Apple has done with the Family Newsletter template.

Add another page to your document by clicking the toolbar's Pages button (or choosing Insert Pages), and then choose 2 & 4 Column Inside (Figure 4-3). Pages adds a second page to your document with this new page style. On this page the designers used three layout breaks to vary the column setup, breaking the page into four layouts: one column at the top of the page with a headline and a rule; two columns of text; a single column containing only a rule; and a four column section on the bottom.

If you want to add template pages in the same layout style, keep typing when you reach the bottom of the page. Pages adds a new page of the same typebut without the placeholder text and graphics.

You can remove a page you've added by placing the insertion point in the page and choosing Edit Delete Page. If youve added enough text to a page to cause text to flow onto the next page, Pages sees those pages as a unit containing linked texta section, in other words. In this case, the menu command reads Delete Pages. The program doesn't let you delete just one of those pagesonly both. To delete just one of those pages, delete all its text and graphics. See Section 3.5.4 for more information about dealing with multipage sections.

Figure 4-3. Most of Pages' templates contain more than one page. From the toolbar's Pages button, choose a new page style to add pages to your document. You can add pages from this menu in any order, and use each of the page designs as many times as you need to.

4.1.1.2. Adding your own words

With a few exceptions, the "Greek" text in the template is placeholder text , intended to show you the document's design. You can't edit this placeholder textyou can only select one big clump of text. Once you've selected the placeholder text, start typing; the placeholder text disappears and your words begin to fill up the space. With the placeholder out of the way, now you're back in the world of normal word processing. Scroll back to the first page, click "Johnson," and then type your own name. (If your name is much longer than Johnson, it forces the headline onto two lines. Select your name , click the Font button in the toolbar to call up the Font panel, and use the font size slider to decrease the size and keep the headline on one line.)

Next, click the main body of the text and start typingor paste in text from another document. The placeholder text disappears, replaced by your words.

Note: If you add your text to a template by copying and pasting from another document, you undoubtedly want to choose Edit

Paste and Match Style (or press Option-Shift- -V) to make your text match the template's style. See Section 1.3.4.1 for more about this useful pasting option.

Two other types of text containers appear in this template: text boxes and shapes with text (see Section 4.2.4.4). Although they can appear identical in a document, only text boxes can be linked so that text flows from one box to another. In contrast, shapes with text are standalone entities. People often use both for sidebars, either as separate blocks of text within a column, or objects you can move around on the page, independent from the columns of normal text. You can tell text is part of a text box or shape as soon as you click itthe box's outline appears, and with it the eight handles you can use to adjust its size (Figure 4-4). Double-click the text inside a text box or shape to edit it.

Click the red text box in the left column. The first click displays its array of handles. Double-click the text inside the box to select the placeholder. (There are three placeholders in this box: a headline, the body text, and the ornament at the bottom.) Type to replace the selected placeholder.

If you decide this document's a keeper, choose File Save, give it a name, choose the destination, and then click Save. When youre working with templates, the document you work on is always a clone of the template. You can modify the document and save it, and still go back to the Template Chooser and find the template there, unchanged, and ready for another use.

4.1.1.3. Adding pictures

The four pictures on this page are also placeholdersbut unlike the Latin text, you can choose to keep pictures you like and replace the others with your own. Click the Media button in the toolbar to display the Media Browser, and then, from its pop-up menu, choose iPhoto. Pages provides this shortcut to your entire iPhoto collection. Scroll through your albums in the top of the window and scroll through your images below. Drag any image out of the Media Browser and drop it on one of the picture placeholders. Pages replaces the template's version of a family picture with your own (Figure 4-5).

If you don't use iPhoto to store your pictures, you can drag a picture file from any folder, from your desktop, or from other photo organizers, such as Photoshop's File Browser.

You can also add pictures to your document without using the picture placeholders. Drop the picture into your document at the approximate place you want it to appear. Pages inserts small pictures at full size and scales down large pictures so they don't take over the whole page. Drag one of the resizing handles to adjust the picture's size.

Replace a photo by dragging another photo on top of it; delete a picture by selecting it and pressing delete.

Figure 4-4. Pages' two varieties of text containers: text boxes (top) and shapes (bottom). When you click a shapeor any objectPages displays its eight selection handles, the hollow black squares around the object's perimeter. Your cursor becomes a double-headed arrow (circled) when it touches one of the handles, signaling its readiness to resize the object. Drag the handle in the middle of one of the four sides to move only that side; drag one of the corner handles to adjust the two adjacent sides at once.