How to create facing-page layouts in Pages
How to create a document that takes facing pages into consideration
At the recent launch of the sixth-generation iPad, Apple also unveiled new iOS versions of the iWork apps: Pages, Keynote and Numbers.
And Pages 4.0 now lets you create and edit documents more flexibly than ever.
Among the additions are Pencil annotation, leveraging the entry-level iPad’s support for Apple’s pressure-sensitive stylus; ePub templates for more ambitious book designs with fixed or reflowing layouts, inspired by iBooks Author; editable shapes to add quick graphics; and paragraph and character styles, which previously could only be set up in the Mac version. Tablet publishing First, though, let’s look at the return of facing pages, lamented since Pages ’09. Pages documents come in two flavours: word processing and page layout. Facing pages can be used with both kinds – in word processing documents for text-based printed books, where the text flows through the pages from beginning to end, and in page layout documents for printed magazines, and other multi-page bound or folded publications that have fixed page layouts combining text and pictures.
Facing Pages doesn’t quite work as we’d like yet, and Pages isn’t ready to print them successfully. Its absence of pre-press features like bleed and CMYK makes it impractical to prepare documents for commercial printing. To print them out yourself, on the other hand, you’d need a feature known as imposition, or booklet printing. Fortunately, it’s available in the free Adobe Reader app on the Mac or Vogelbusch’s Create Booklet (£4.99) on iOS.
You’ll need to export your Pages document to PDF, import it into one of these, output as a booklet on A3 paper or scaled down to turn your A4 layouts into an A5 book, then fold and staple. We’ve glossed over the part where the backs may print upside-down, which requires some experimentation to fix.
In the iOS version of Pages, the only way to create a page layout document is to use an existing template, and the Newsletter templates are all in word processing mode, so you’ll need to… well, let us explain step by step. It’s a bit of a faff, but doable once you know how.