Tom Gorham
Pages may not be as well-known as InDesign or QuarkXPress, but for small print-runs, Apple’s application has a lot to offer.
Pages isn’t the sort of page layout application that under normal circumstances you’re likely to mention in the same sentence as QuarkXPress or InDesign. Frankly, many would struggle to place it at opposite ends of the same paragraph. But in the past fortnight, I’ve discovered that when it comes to producing a quick series of documents, such as the newsletter template I produced for a local youth rugby team, Pages has a lot going for it.
Yes, it isn’t meant for high-end printing, and your printer is likely to supply the sort of blank looks that were hitherto reserved for those who blithely present them with Microsoft Publisher files if you ever attempt to deliver a native Pages document to them. The caveats continue: Pages doesn’t support CMYK separations, and in practical terms, it isn’t suitable for long, image-heavy documents because it embeds images in the document, which can quickly balloon file sizes. In its favour, Pages has some effective masking features, including a decent alpha channel masking tool, and support for transparency and object reflection. It’s also quick to launch and easy to use, and all at a price tag that’s a fraction of its high-end rivals.
There’s one other handy extra: a choice of templates that allow you to build presentable publications quickly. The small drawback here is that while the templates offered by Pages are decent, they are scarce enough in number – certainly compared to rival budget layout application BeLight Publisher (belightsoft.com) – that any document produced using one is easily identifiable as such.
There are ways of combatting the threat of social ostracism that may follow being outed as someone whose design talents are founded on built-in templates. There are third-party templates for sale on the Internet (the ones at stocklayouts.com are excellent, if pricey). But I found it easier than I expected to create my own templates, with the advantage that by defining my own from scratch, I could establish a style for text, pictures, page numbering and even how tables are presented that others could follow for future editions of the newsletter. I like to think of it as a simpler version of Quark’s Job Jackets feature.
At its most basic, creating your own template involves designing a layout within Pages and saving it as a template from the program’s File menu. By default, documents saved this way are stored in your user’s Library/Application Support/iWork/Pages/Templates/My Templates folder, and when you subsequently launch the application they automatically appear in the Templates chooser, listed under the My Templates section.
Creating a template in this basic fashion only offers a glimpse at what the templating feature has to offer, though. Apple’s own templates often comprise several different pages, which can be added to a document by selecting the relevant page from the Toolbar’s Pages menu. Adding a similar feature to your own templates is simple: navigate to the page in your proposed template that you want to make available from the menu and choose Menu > Format > Advanced > Capture Pages.
You can tidy things up by naming the pages descriptively and ordering how they will appear in the Pages menu, which is done in the Format > Advanced > Manage Pages dialog box. Once a page is captured, you can delete the original from the template – it will still be accessible from the Insert > Pages menu when you’ve saved the document as a template.
Another tip for creating good-looking newsletters is to adjust the margins of pages to accommodate spreads. Ensure that ‘Facing Pages’ is turned on in the Document Inspector palette, and that you have specified different settings for inside and outside margins. To view spreads on the screen, select Two Up in the Page View pop-up menu at the bottom-left corner of the window.
For more easily editable templates, you should also define placeholder text and media to be replaced when the template is edited, while retaining the formatting specified in the template. To define placeholder text, you select and style the template text to use as a placeholder and choose Format > Advanced > Define as Placeholder Text. As an aside, and based on past experience, it’s better to use ‘Lorem Ipsum’ text whenever you’re setting placeholder text; if you use readable text, there’s always a chance that it will make its way into final versions without further amendment.
You can do the same for pictures by selecting the image, adjusting its properties, and choosing Format > Advanced > Define as Media Placeholder. Using a media placeholder ensures that any future image dropped into it will adopt the same size, position and frame as the placeholder image.
Once I’d established the template, I needed to decide how I wanted to print the document. For short-run digital printing or creating PDFs for online download, Pages is adept. I’d thought that the biggest hurdle might be imposing the document, so that if I was printing spreads, the pages printed in the correct order. After all, imposition is something that even high-end applications have struggled with over the years. You can, of course, manually impose your document. This could get awkward, particularly for numbered pages, if you do this in Pages, though it’s a lot easier if you export from Pages to PDF.
While some have complained about the quality of Pages PDF exports, it seems to me that Pages 09 has improved output quality, particularly when it comes to text. Its File > Export function lets you export as a PDF document at three different quality levels – good, better or best – all of which looked good on a colour desktop printer. If you’re not happy with the results, or are using an older version of Pages, try exporting it as a native PostScript file from the Print dialog box.
Irrespective of whether you export a PDF or a PostScript file, Preview opens it, and you can arrange the pages to match how they will be paginated just by dragging the page thumbnails in Preview’s sidebar. In an eight-page document, for example, page eight will be placed above page one, page seven next to page two, and so on. Once they’ve been organised, in Preview’s print dialog box, select two images per page – assuming that’s how many pages you want to print on a sheet – and adjust the paper size to compensate, together with any two-sided print settings your printer supports. Then let the presses roll.
If that all seems a bit of a hassle – and it did to me – I was delighted to discover a simpler alternative: the free Create Booklet (bit.ly/d85nvm). This is an Automator workflow that basically handles the page imposition for you directly from Pages. It adds a Create Booklet option to the PDF pull-down menu in the Print dialog box, and when selected, handles page imposition for you, opening the result in Preview for printing. It’s an automatic process that doesn’t leave much obvious scope for tweaking any parameters, but the script lives with other PDF services in your Mac’s /Library/PDF Services/ folder. If you open the PDF create Booklet file in this folder in Automator, you’ll be able to adjust settings such as page order and paper size.
