Edit and format text in Pages on iOS

Tap into Pages’ powerful text-handling tools to improve your documents

If you’re looking to edit text with a bit of flair and panache, there’s no substitute for Apple’s own Pages app. But for all its extra features, Pages remains first and foremost a word processor. In this tutorial we’re going to focus on exploring its text-based tools to reveal how to simplify, speed up, and improve the way you work with text documents on your iPad.

Pages has evolved to put more text-editing and formatting tools at your fingertips. Start typing, and you’ll see the pop-up keyboard now offers shortcuts to a number of useful formatting options. You’ll notice one particular option, the resize text tool, offers a limited number of text sizing options, but don’t worry – if none of these fit, you’ll find the Format Painter enables you to resize in one-point increments, from single-point text up into the hundreds. You’ll also find other text-styling tools – bold, italic, underline, and strike-through – here too.

One major limitation is that there’s still no way to update text styles on your iPad. You can, naturally, edit text styles on the fly for selected text, following the stepby-step guide opposite. It’s just a shame you can’t yet save those changes, either by updating an existing style or by creating a new one. Instead, you need to open the document in Pages on your Mac, apply changes there, then sync the document back via iCloud.

Don’t forget to make use of Pages’ spellcheck tool. Tap the “…” button and make sure Check Spelling is switched on. Once enabled, misspelled words will be shown with a red underline. Tap it and choose Replace to see suggested alternatives, then tap the correction. Pages will also use your system-wide autocorrect settings to correct mistyping; to switch this on and off, return to the Home screen and choose Settings > General > Keyboard.

Last, but not least, flick on the Word Count switch under “…” and you’ll see a running word count appear at the bottom of the screen. Tap and drag it to reposition it, or tap it to reveal more detailed statistics.