Publish like a pro
Pages, Apple’s publishing app, is free, fun and surprisingly powerful Pages rewards exploration: a ‘what does this button do?’ approach uncovers great ideas
Pages is capable of much more than bashing out the odd letter. You can use it to create eyepopping adverts, fab flyers, nifty newsletters, mouthwatering menus, and pretty much any other kind of document you can imagine, and you can use it to create ebooks and to collaborate on documents via iCloud.
We’ve used it to write books, create album covers and design brochures, and we’re constantly amazed by how easy it is to use and how great the results are. And yet many Mac users don’t use it, opting for less friendly and often more expensive document creation apps.
Pages’ existing password protection option has recently been supplemented with Touch ID on the new MacBook Pro, whose Touch Bar also benefits from fast access to key features based on what’s currently selected; you can collaborate with others in real time with Pages on Mac, iPad, iPhone and on iCloud.com; you can now easily replace fonts through an entire document; Rich Text Format (RTF) import and export has been added; and tabbed windows enable you to work across multiple documents without having multiple open windows.
None of this would be helpful if Pages didn’t talk to other apps, but it does. You can export your masterpiece as PDF, Word document or ePub as well as RTF and plain text, and you can send documents by email, Messages or AirDrop or add them to Notes. If you embed images or movies you can also optimise them for playback on iOS devices.
Hidden powers
In this tutorial, we’ll use a simple brochure to explore some of Pages design tools. We’ll use Instant Alpha to remove the background colours of images, and we’ll explore the use of masks to control how images display in your document and how text flows around them. We’ll also look at the various formatting options for images and text, and how you can stack different elements on the page for special effects, like having a faded image in the background.
One thing we won’t be doing is using Pages own media browser to organise and add images, as this can prove to be a very slow process. We’ve found that organising our images in Photos albums and dragging them from Photos to Pages is much faster. If you’d rather not use Photos you can easily drag from a Finder folder instead. It’s a minor flaw in an otherwise excellent app.