Create Pages documents like a pro

How to create a document that takes facing pages into consideration

REQUIRES

iOS 11 or later, Pages for iOS

you will learn

How to create a document with facing pages

IT WILL TAKE

30 minutes

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; ePub templates for more ambitious book designs; editable shapes for adding graphics; and paragraph and character styles, borrowed from the Mac.

First, let’s look at facing pages. 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 books, and in page layout documents for 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, and Pages isn’t ready to print them successfully — the absence of pre-press features like bleed and CMYK makes it impractical to prepare documents for commercial printing. To print them out yourself, you’d need a feature known as imposition, or booklet printing, which is available in Adobe Reader (free, macOS) or Vogelbusch’s Create Booklet (£4.99, iOS).

You’ll need to export your Pages document to PDF, import it into one of these, output it 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… let us explain. It’s a bit tricky, but doable once you know how. Adam Banks