Section 7.4. Creating Templates from Scratch | iWork 05: The Missing Manual

7.4. Creating Templates from Scratch

If you're a real do-it-yourselfer, you can create templates from scratch, by starting with the Blank template and building up a sample document exactly the way you want it. Even though you're starting with the Blank template, it still contains the whole range of default, or standard, elements as listed on Section 7.1. You can accept these factory settings or change each and every one of them for your custom template.

Start by opening a new document using the Blank template. This document becomes the model document you modify to create a template. Choose File Save right off the bat and give it a titlesomething like, "Press release template model." Then, as you work on it, periodically press -S to save your work. After you're all done creating the model document, you save it as a template.

Begin by choosing File Page Setup and selecting the paper size and orientation. Then start defining all the styles and standard settings for the documents various elements: text styles, text box styles, shape styles, table styles, chart styles, image styles, and movie styles.

7.4.1. Defining Text Styles

Choose View Show Styles Drawer to expose the standard list of eight basic styles. Click the Body style in the list and type some text into the document so you have something to work with. Modify the font and paragraph attributes using the Text Inspector and the Font Panel to create your version of that style, then click the red triangle next to the style name and, from the pop-up menu, choose Redefine Style From Selection. Pages replaces the stock style with your own.

Work down the list, clicking the style name, modifying the text for each style, and saving the results with the Redefine Style From Selection command. Add new styles by choosing Create New Paragraph Style From Selection from the red triangle's pop-up menu, or by clicking the Add (+) button at the bottom of the Styles Drawer. You'll find all the details of style creation starting on Section 3.2.

7.4.2. Defining Object Styles

Each type of object you can insert in a Pages document has a default, or standard, style that you can set by inserting the object, adjusting it to your liking, and then defining it as the default style.

7.4.2.1. Text boxes

Insert a fixed text box and type some text into it (Figure 7-2). Use the Font Panel and the Text Inspector to set the font, style, color , alignment, character spacing, and so on. (See Section 2.1.1.2 for details on text formatting.) Press -Return to select the text box. Now use the Graphic Inspector to set all of its object attributes: the fill, stroke, shadow, and opacity (Section 4.4). Use the Wrap Inspector to set the wrapping style (Section 4.3.7). Don't bother adjusting the text box's size or rotationPages doesn't save these attributes in the template's default text box style.

Figure 7-2. To define a standard text box style for a template, start by inserting a text box and formatting it exactly the way you'd like one to appear when you insert a new text box using the template. In this newsletter template, for example, you most often use text boxes for pull quotes inserted in the text to break up long stories. Type some sample text and format it using the Text Inspector (for color, alignment, and spacing) and the Font panel (for the font, size, and text shadow). Then select the box and use the Graphic Inspector to set its fill, stroke, shadow, and opacity. When you're happy with the results, choose Format Advanced Define Default Text Box Style.

When you're pleased with the appearance of the text and the text box, select the text box and choose Format Advanced Define Default Text Box Style. Pages locks away all the adjustments youve made for a standard text box. Give it a try by inserting another text box. It should match your model text box in all respectsexcept it won't contain any text. Start typing and you see the text displayed in your chosen font. Now that you've defined the default text box style, you can delete these text boxes to get them out of the way.

7.4.2.2. Shapes

Since they can also contain text, shapes are very similar to text boxes. Insert a fixed shape in the document and repeat the same steps you used for a text box to format the text and the object attributes. When you're happy with the effect, choose Format Advanced Define Default Shape Style to add this new style to the defaults. Insert another shape to test it out. Then you can delete the shapes to get them out of your hairand it might be a good time to save the document.

7.4.2.3. Tables

Insert a table, and then alter and adjust its many attributes until it meets all your requirements for the perfect tabular model for this document. See Chapter 5 for the complete story on table creation.

You must exercise some table-tweaking restraint, however, when you design a standard table: you can adjust the overall size of the table, but columns must be of equal width and rows must be of equal height; the cells of a header row or column must be formatted alike; the inside cell borders must be all alike; and the four sides of the table border must also be alike. Additionally, Pages doesn't save table rotation or added texttables always emerge on an even keel and devoid of text. Of course, once you create documents from the finished template, you're free to use all of Pages' table-manipulation abilities .

Open the Wrap Inspector to choose the text wrapping style for tables.

Select the table and choose Format Advanced Define Default Table Style when youve perfected your design. Test out your new style by inserting another tableand then clear the decks by deleting the tables to make room for

7.4.2.4. Charts

Defining chart styles for your template is a bit different from other objects because there are eight varieties of charts to choose from. First determine which type of chart appears when you insert a chart in a document. To do this, choose Insert Chart or use the Objects button in the toolbar to place a fixed chart on the page. Open the Chart Inspector and, from its pop-up menu, select your preferred chart type. Choose Format Advanced Make [chart type] the Default Chart Type.

The second part of defining your template's charts is defining the style for each of the eight chart styles. Unfortunately, at least in Pages version 1.0.2, this feature doesn't work. Here's how it's supposed to work: insert a chart, use the Chart Inspector's pop-up menu to select a chart type, adjust the chart's attributes (grid lines, tick marks, axis labels, text wrapping, and so on), and choose Format Advanced Define Default Style for [chart type]. Up to this point everything works fine.

Now you're supposed to repeat the process for each of the other chart types. But as you select other chart types you find that the settings you just made for the first chart type apply to them all. And if you try to define the style for another chart type, it wipes out the style of your first chart typeand actually applies to all the chart types.

Until Apple gets around to squashing this bug, just set your default chart type and define the default style only for it. When you use other chart types in your document, you have to modify their attributes one by one, or paste in a preformatted chart from your chart library.

7.4.2.5. Images

Insert an image on the pagefrom either the Media Browser or a folder on your hard drive. Open the Graphic Inspector and, if you like, add a stroke or a shadow; or adjust the image's opacity. Use the Wrap Inspector to set the text wrapping style. You can't set a standard image size or rotation. When you're done, choose Format Advanced Define Default Image Style.

7.4.2.6. Movies

Insert a movie on the page. You can't add a stroke to a movie, but you can add a shadow or adjust its opacity in the Graphic Inspector. Use the Wrap Inspector to control the text wrapping style. Again, size and rotation changes can't be saved as standard settings. When you're ready, choose Format Advanced Define Default Movie Style.

7.4.3. Making Placeholders

Now that you've defined all the various elements that you can add to a document, you can begin formatting the model document itself and adding placeholder text and graphics. Before beginning this phase, make sure you're working on a blank sheetdelete any images, tables, text boxes, and so on that you've been working with. Also delete any text you've added to the page. When you're again staring at a blank slate, begin building up your template's contents.

You can add two different kinds of text elements to a template: regular, editable text, or placeholder text. You can see both kinds at work in Apple's built-in templates that you can read about on Section 4.1.1.1. When you click regular text, you can place your insertion point within it and add or delete charactersnothing unusual about it. When you click a text placeholder , Pages highlights the entire placeholder, which can be a word, a line, a paragraph, or several paragraphs. Then, when you type even one character, Pages replaces the whole thing.

Use regular text in a template when you need to modify this text in your document, rather than replace it. This choice is good for the salutation on a letterhead, or a story that's repeated in your newsletter every month with small changes, for example, "Congratulations to Employee of the Month Kate McClain! She's now automatically entered in our Employee of the Year competition and could be the lucky winner of a beautiful 1975 AMC Pacer!"

Use placeholder text when you want to replace all the text when you use the templatein other words, when you just want aplaceholder. You can use any text for placeholders: copy some random text from another document, from a Web page, or use "Greek" text like you find in Apple's templates.

Tip: There are plenty of sources of "Lorem ipsum" "Greek" text on the Internet. A good one is www.lipsum.com, where you can generate as many words or paragraphs of this dummy text as you need. Then copy it from your Web browser and paste it into Pages.

Pages handles template graphics in a similar fashion. Insert regular graphics into your template that you want to display in the finished documentfor example, background images, logos, or your author portrait. Use placeholder graphics in the template for images you want to replace when you make a new document: things like the picture of the week, the weather map, the album cover for your music review column, and so on.

Placeholders begin life in your document as regular text and graphicslater you turn them into placeholders using Format Advanced Define as Placeholder Text (or Define as Image Placeholder).

Build up your page with text and graphics by adding layout and section breaks, columns, headers and footersanything you need to create the perfect template, the starting point for your documents. (See Chapter 2 for details on how all these document-formatting tools work.) All of Pages' text, document, and object formatting capabilities are at your disposal. Insert your regular text and graphics, and placeholder text and graphicsbut don't define the placeholders until your layout is complete and you're all finished with the final size and position adjustments.

To convert regular text to placeholder text, choose View Show Invisibles, and then select a block of text to turn into a placeholderbut dont select the final paragraph break. Choose Format Advanced Define as Placeholder Text (Figure 7-3).

Note: Be sure you don't select the final paragraph break when you define placeholder text. If you do select that final paragraph break, you're telling Pages to replace the entire paragraphincluding all its formatting. Then, when you type into your document to replace the text in the placeholder, your typing takes on the format of the following paragraph instead of the placeholder paragraph.

If you need to modify placeholder textthat you've created or that's part of one of the Apple templatesselect the placeholder and choose Format Advanced Enable Placeholder Text Authoring (which, in less geeky English, means Make Placeholder Text Editable). When youre done editing the placeholder text, secure its placeholder status once more by choosing Format Advanced Disable Placeholder Text Authoring.

Figure 7-3. After creating your document mockup , you can change blocks of text into placeholder text for your template. Choose View Show Invisibles and select all the text except the final paragraph break (circled). Then choose Format Advanced Define as Placeholder Text.

You can select a placeholder and press Delete to delete the entire thing. Or you can select it and choose Format Advanced Define as Placeholder Text to turn it back into good old everyday text. When you use this command on text thats already a placeholder, you undo it, removing the checkmark from in front of the command in the menu, and turning it back into regular text.

Along the same lines, you can create placeholders from images. Image placeholders can only be picturesphotographs or graphicsnot movies, shapes, or text boxes. Insert an image in your document (Section 4.2.1) and adjust its size, position, rotation, stroke, shadow, and opacity. When it's perfect in every way, choose Format Advanced Define as Image Placeholder. Now, when you drop another image file on top of this placeholder, it replaces the placeholder graphic but inherits all its size, rotation, shadow, and other attributes.

You can turn a placeholder image back into a regular image by using the same command again: Format Advanced Define as Image Placeholder. This time, when you choose the command, Pages removes the checkmark in the menu in front of the command.

You can reposition, resize, rotate, and adjust any of a placeholder image's attributesyou can even select it and press Delete to remove it.

7.4.4. Building Multipage Templates

A template can be as many pages long as you need. For example, if you create a 12-page document and save it as a template, then that template creates a 12-page document. It may be more practical, however, to create a multipage document and divide it up into pages, or sets of pages, that you can choose to add to the document only when you need them. Many of the Apple templates are designed this way. They open up to a first page and then you can decide to add more pages to the document by choosing them from the Pages button in the toolbar or from the Insert Pages menu.

Single pages, or groups of pages, can appear as individual items in the Insert Pages menu only when youve defined them as a section (see Section 3.5.3).

To break up your document into sections, first create all the pages you want to appear in the template. For example, a product announcement packet might contain a cover page, a three-column page, a two-column page, a one-column page, three pages with product listings in a large table, an order form table page, and a back page. Use the following technique to create such a multipage template and define the pages that appear in the Insert Pages menu.

Create the document with all these pages separated by page breaks. Choose View Invisibles so you can see the page break characters .

Save As, give this backup copy a unique name, and then click Save.

Starting at the top of the document, highlight each page break and choose Insert Section Break to create a logical page division .

Replace the final page break on the next-to-last page with a section break to complete the logical page definition process .

Figure 7-4. This nine-page document is divided by section breaks into seven sections. One section's made up of three pages. From the point of view of Pages' commandsCapture Pages, Manage Pages, Insert Pages, and Delete Pagethis three-page section is one logical page.

Scroll up and place your insertion point in the document's second page. Choose Format Advanced Capture Pages .

A window titled "Create Pages from the current section" appears. Give the page a name to appear under the Pages menu, say, "3-column." This section is made up of only one page, therefore the Include pop-up menu reads "First page only," and its other options are grayed out. Click OK.
Move your insertion point into the document's third page (two-column) and repeat the Capture Pages routine. Move your insertion point into the fourth page (one-column) and capture that page as well .

As you capture the pages, they appear under the Insert Pages button in the toolbar and in the Insert Pages menu.
Advanced Capture Pages.
This time the "Create Pages from the current section" window's pop-up menu choices are all available. Since this section contains three pages, choosing "First three pages" or "All pages" has the same result, adding the three-page section to the Insert Pages menu as a single item.

In a different circumstance, you could use this pop-up menu to add just the first, the first two, or the first three pages to the Insert Pages menuextracting those physical pages from a longer logical page. You can extract only physical pages in this way starting at the beginningin other words, you can't extract one page from the middle or end of a section.
Check to make sure all the pages you've captured appear in the Insert Pages menu and that they do insert the pages at the end of the document the way you intended .
Congratulations, you've finished the creation part of making a template! Now there's just a little cleanup. Select all the pages you don't want to appear when you open this template by clicking in the document's last page, scrolling up to the first of the pages you want to delete, and Shift-clicking there. (Or you can place your insertion point within a page to delete just one page at a time.) Choose Edit Delete Pages .

Pages displays a confirmation dialog box asking if you're sure you want to delete pages 58, or whichever pages you selected. The dialog box also contains the note: "The sections containing these pages will be deleted" to remind you that the program can delete only sections, or logical pages . In other words, if your five-page document isn't divided into sections, you can't delete any of those pages without deleting the entire document.
Click Delete if the listed page range represents the pages you want to delete from the template's new-document view .

You should be left with the first page or pages of the documentjust the way you want it to first appear when you use this template.
Choose Insert Pages to view the pages menu. If the pages youve captured and added to this menu appear in the wrong order, you can rearrange them. Note that Pages represents the logical pages containing more than one physical page with a stacked pages icon .
Choose Format Advanced Manage Pages (Figure 7-5). The Manage Pages window appears, and shows you the list of your captured pages. Select one of the items, and then use the up and down arrow buttons to move it up or down the list; or the Remove (-) button to delete it from the Insert Pages menu. Rename any of the pages in this list by double-clicking its name. Click Done when youve got everything in the right order; the Insert Pages menu reflects the changes you've made (Figure 7-5, bottom) .
Decide whether you want to show or hide the Styles Drawer, Layout, Rulers, or Invisibles in your new-document view, and place the insertion point or click the margin to hide it .
The last step: choose File Save as Template, give your new template a name, choose a destination folder to save it to (usually My Templates), and then click Save .