Serious problem using Styles

Question

If I try to select a style via the stylesheet drawer, Pages basically stops dead while a red arrow moves up and down the style drawer. When the arrow finally settles, which could take as long as a minute, it sometimes changes a selection to the style I want, and sometimes it doesn't.
Has anyone else seen this? There are three issues:
1. Selecting style via the style drawer stops Pages in its tracks
2. Sometimes if I select text to change to a different style, it simply doesn't happen, or some aspects of the style is adopted and other aspects aren't. I'm following the methods stated in Pages Help to do this and it doesn't help.
3. Sometimes a font or style changes to something completely different when I'm adding text, and this happens when the style I've adopted is still selected.

Answer 1

Hello [email protected],
your problems seems to be out of my scope, but something (your #3) may appear because of the normal style handling of Pages. I don't know if this solves some of your problems, but I post it for clarification.
When you copy a text from any document (like HTML or PDF or whatever) Mac OS X tries to keep the adjustments and attributes for it. When you paste this text snippet into Pages, all it's attributes will be pasted as well.
So if you want to paste text with the selected style into Pages, place the text cursor, press the controll key and the left mouse button (or if you own a multi button mouse the right button) to activate the contextual menu. There select the menu item "Paste and Adapt Style" (or what sound similar; I'm a german user and don't know the titles of the english version of Pages). Now your pasted text should be in the style you have selected.
Another handling of assigning styles to existing text: When your text cursor is placed inside a paragraph and you selects a style with one mouse click, only the font family changes. When you double click the style, the entire attributes of the style are assigned to every word of the paragraph. So you can assign a new style, but emphasised words will keep it's attributs, even with the new font.
I know the problem with the appearing of the triangle inside the styles drawer, too. But for me, it happens by using a lot of different styles inside a huge document and don't frees my Mac. It seems to be, that Pages checks the current active paragraph with all the styles and the attributes inside the styles drawer, the mouse moves over.
I hope one or two thinks of my post will help you.
Frank.