iWork '09: The Missing Manual
by Josh Clark

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Summary of iWork '09: The Missing Manual

How Grids Help You Build Better-Looking Pages Documents
by Josh Clark

It?s not always obvious, but just about every professional layout is built on top of a very specific formal structure, a sturdy framework lurking under the surface of even the most complex and dizzying designs. For centuries, artists, printers, and designers have organized their compositions with grids composed of horizontal and vertical lines that invisibly slice the canvas into blocks, or grid units, that help the designer to align and size page elements, as you can see here:

A grid keeps things clean, giving you guidelines to provide consistent placement and spacing throughout your document and to ensure well proportioned elements within individual pages. Grids can help to organize any design, but they?re particularly helpful in providing internal consistency to lengthy documents like books, magazines, or newsletters.

The previous figure shows a pair of pages from the catalog, both of them organized with a six-column grid. For standard portrait pages like these, it?s common to use five- or six-column grids, but that doesn?t mean that you have to crowd your content into five or six narrow columns. Those columns are simply your building blocks, the lines of an invisible ruler that you use to line up your page elements. A six-column grid might contain only two text columns, for example. Both text columns could be three grid units wide, or one could be four and the other two. Or you could reserve one column entirely for white space. While the grid itself is built of uniform blocks, in other words, the design elements that you build on top of it can be all different sizes.

Using alignment guides

You build a grid in Pages using alignment guides, vertical and horizontal guidelines which you conjure from Pages? rulers and place anywhere on the page, like a virtual T-square. These lines aren?t part of the document itself?they?re visible only when you?re editing, and they don?t show up when you print. They?re unique to every page of the document?every page has its own set of alignment guides that you can tweak and nudge without affecting guides on other pages.

You pluck vertical guides from the vertical ruler, and horizontal guides from the horizontal ruler. To add an alignment guide, choose View-->Show Rulers. Click anywhere inside the ruler and drag the cursor into your document?your pointer now has a blue guideline in its craw, as shown here:

Add alignment guides to your page by clicking in the ruler and dragging into the document. Pull horizontal guidelines (left) out of the top ruler and vertical guidelines (right) from the left ruler. As you drag, Pages shows you the distance of your guideline from the edge of the page.

Drop the line wherever you want it in your document. To move an alignment guide, just drag it to its new location. To remove it entirely, drag it out of the document, and the guide goes up in a puff of smoke.

When you add or move objects, the objects snap to these alignment guides, jumping over to line up automatically with these magnetic guides whenever you drag objects within a few pixels. This makes it effortless to keep things aligned, neatly avoiding the dreaded ?one pixel off? syndrome.

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