If you're reading this in North America, your default is Letter. Pages defaults to your country's typical printing size, in my case A4. Trim size (as it's known in publishing parlance) is the dimensions of our book as trimmed by the final cutting process. Since we're predominately working with text, we'll be switching between the Style, Layout and More tabs.įirst, let's set up the document and change our trim size. The Format panel is context-aware, so what you'll see changes according to what's selected. You can switch between Format and Document settings using the selector as shown below. While on the right we have our Format and Document Panel, where we'll configure our book at the document and content (format) level. In the middle panel, we have our document, currently empty and much too large (A4). When it comes time to creating and styling sections, you'll want the Page Thumbnails displayed. You can customise what's displayed using the drop-down menu, as shown below. Going back to the main UI, on the left we have our thumbnail view. It's worth taking a few minutes to see what's available. Like most Mac apps (including Scrivener), you can customise this by right-clicking the toolbar, selecting Customise Toolbar… and dragging in the tools you need. The minimal Apple Pages UIįor a brief walk around the UI, you'll first note the toolbar on the top. Still, the simplicity of its UI belies its power in typical Apple fashion. Compared to Word or Indesign, Pages is decidedly minimalistic. If you are seeing Pages for the first time, you might feel underwhelmed by the lack of tools on display. Once you select the template, you'll get a blank document, framed within Pages' minimal user-interface. I'll show you how to do this at the end of the tutorial. Note that we can save a document as a template for future use, so it's worth setting up your document the way you like, and reusing it for other publications as needed. I'll select a Blank portrait document from the Choose a Template screen show below. With a manuscript in hand, I'll open Pages and create a new document. If you prefer to write in Ulysses or iA Writer, they can export to DOCX too. Note, I'm using the Word format because it's well-supported by Scrivener and Pages. So I'll assume you have your own Word document ready to go. Since this tutorial is about Pages, I'll not describe Scrivener's compile process here ( I've covered the basics elsewhere). For the sake of the tutorial, I'll use the first chapter of my book, Cadoc's Contract. I'll compile the manuscript into a DOCX (Word document). Getting startedīefore I get to Pages, I'll need a copy of my manuscript, which I write in Scrivener. Note, however, it's for an older version of Pages (v7.3), and I disagree with Amazon's assertion the current version of Pages (v10) lacks the essential features. If you want a step-by-step guide, Amazon provides one on the KDP website. I'll apply my knowledge of InDesign to what's essentially a word processing app with some tricks up its sleeves. Rather than a prescriptive, step-by-step instructional guide, I'm describing my process as I explore the app. Note, I say tutorial in the broadest possible sense of the word. As I noted in my review, Pages is free for Mac and iPad and is surprisingly capable. In this first of two spin-off tutorials, I'll show you how to create a book using Apple Pages. In my last post, I reviewed a bunch of alternatives to InDesign for creating paperback books for print-on-demand (POD) services like Amazon KDP.
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