Defining styles for my page layout.

Question

Is there any in depth resource for what styles are and how to define them for laying out a page in Pages? I am terribly lost!

Answer 1

Hello Zenmind,
there are three different kind of styles and you can work with them in every text area of Pages: in the main text area, in textboxes and in objects with inserted text.
1) The paragraph style
Paragraphs will be created by a new line character. This you insert in text areas by hitting the return key. So every inserted new line character (you can see them by showing the invisibles; menu: "View/Show Invisibles") creates a paragraph. To create a paragraph style, place the text cursor inside such a paragraph text and adjust the options in the "Text" inspector in the four tab panels "Text", "List", "Tabs" and more.
After you are satisfied with the look of it, show the styles drawer (menu: "View/Show Styles Drawer") and click onto the down pointing triangle right beside the marked style name. In the appearing menu you can choose the top item "Create New Paragraph Style From Selection..." to get what it says. Give it a proper name and your new created paragraph style will appear in the styles drawer in the list of the paragraph styles.
If you want to change an existing paragraph style, place the text cursor in the text of the paragraph you want to alter and adjust the options you want to have. Now show the same menu in the paragraph style drawer I mentioned above (to show you that there are changes, the triangle is red now) and choose the second item "Redefine Style From Selection".
For changing the style of one paragraph to an other style, place the text cursor inside the paragraph text and use the style menu in the button panel of the document window or select the style name in the styles drawer. Now you can change the paragraph in two ways. a) Do a single-click and the bold and italic (color, etc.) marked words will remain if the font of the selected style is installed in bold and italic. b) Do a double-click and all characters of the paragraph will be changed into the font style of the selected paragraph style.
2) The list style
In the style drawer you can find a list of styles for lists (the button with the three lines at the drawers bottom border). The handling is the same as with the paragraph styles.
3) The character style
With this styles you can mark characters and words inside of paragraphs. You can show the styles with the button that displays the underlined "a" beside the show/hide "List" button. Unfortunately this function is not working correctly. You can choose by creating such a style which attributes you want to store in the style. By marking words and assigning this character style to them, ALL attributes will be assigned, not only the selcted.
I know some feedbacks of this bug were sent to the developers and hopefully this will be corrected in the next version.
I hope this helps you to understand styles and the creation/handling of them.