Master Pages for iOS’s new features

Take advantage of new formatting tools, bookmarks and more in Pages for iOS.

“When you open a document that contains fonts that are unavailable on iOS, look out for a brief warning at the top right of the screen; tap it to see which are missing, then ‘Resolve Font Warnings’ only if you’re OK with substituting Helvetica.”

In 2014, Apple revamped its iWork office suite by ‘dumbing down’ the Mac version to bring it in line with the less powerful iOS iteration. Happily, since then, it has restored missing features and added new ones, with iPad users gaining many excellent tools for the first time.

Pages 3.1 for iOS is in this vein. It has new text formatting tools, including superscript and subscript formatting options, support for ligatures (see ‘Make use of ligatures’ opposite) and background colour control.

When writing long documents, it helps to be able to rapidly navigate them. Our second step-by-step guide will show you how to use Pages’ new Bookmarks feature to move quickly between the different parts of a document, which you specify.

WORDS AND NUMBERS

Mathematicians will be pleased to discover that Pages now supports equations through LaTeX commands or MathML elements — our final step-by-step guide here reveals how the formatting and markup tools work. Other changes are minor. When you protect a document by tapping the three dots (...) icon and choosing ‘Set Password’. For example, you can now choose to protect it using Touch ID.

MORE NEWFEATURES

You can customise dates, times and currencies for different languages and regions. First, go to Settings > General > Keyboard to enable a second keyboard, then once done tap ‘...’ in Pages and choose ‘Language & Region’ to make the switch.

Pages 3.1 also supports both importing and exporting documents in the popular Rich Text Format (RTF), and claims to make it easier to swap out missing fonts. When you open a document that contains fonts that are unavailable on iOS, look out for a brief warning at the top right of the screen; tap it to see which are missing, then ‘Resolve Font Warnings’ only if you’re OK with substituting Helvetica.

When creating pie charts, you’re now given the opportunity to add new leader lines for clear labelling. Tap ‘ Value Labels’ inside the Format inspector’s Chart pane, then choose to position them ‘Outside’ to reveal three options: none, straight and angled.