How To Adjust Margins In Mac Pages

Learn how to adjust the margins for Pages documents and what document margins really affect. Margins never restrict objects you place, so you can treat them as guidelines not restrictions in most cases.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's talk about margins in Pages.
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Let's start with a word processing document. So here we have our default Body Text. You can see the cursor blinking in that. Let's say we want to setup specific margins. First to actually see what the margins are set to you want to go to the Sidebar here. Go to Document. Then in the document area of the Sidebar you can find Document Margins. You can see here they are set to one inch all the way around, top, bottom, left, right. Now if you actually want to see the margins on the page we can. We can actually do that one of two ways. The first way is to go to View and let's Show Ruler. This will show the ruler here at the top of the page. I'm going to zoom out a little bit to 75%. You can see here the left and right margins are indicated here on the ruler. They are not actually the margins. These are the indents. But by default they are going to match. I'll talk more about indents in a minute. If we want to see the top and bottom margins as well we can use View and then Show Layout. This will show us here a box which is the Body Text. The body text is going to be this text field that flows from one page to the next and it fits perfectly in the margins. So if I were to take the top margin and, say, decrease it a bit you can see it change there. Increase it a bit and it changes there. The same thing with the bottom, the left, and the right.
Now we do have the ability to turn on Facing Pages. That's when you have like a book or a magazine or a newsletter and you're going to have page one be the front cover, page 2 and 3 face each other, and then even and odd pages facing each other from that point on. If I turn Off Facing Pages then things change quite a bit. You can see here page 1 will be by itself. I can insert a page break and you can see page 2, another page break, page 3. So you can see how everything after page 1 are two facing pages.  The the document margins change to have top and bottom like before but now Inside and Outside margins. So if I go to pages 2 and 3 here by changing the inside margin you can see how it changes the right margin on page 2 and the left margin on page 1. This is the inside near the binding for the book. 
So now let's talk about indents. Indents, which are shown here in the Ruler are where the text actually flows to. So indents work on a paragraph level. Not for the entire document. So here I have two paragraphs of text. If I were to change the document margins, let's change the left side, you can see all the text changes. If I wanted to just change the indent then I could do so by going to Format, and then Layout, and here are the Indents. So there's left and right. You could see that just changes it for the current paragraph. So if I have my cursor in this paragraph I could change the left indent there.  There's also the First Line Indent which is separate from the left side of all the rest of the line. You could see here how I could actually just drag the indent here. So while the indent starts at the margins it doesn't have to stay there. You can have the indent set on a per paragraph level.
Now let's change to Page Layout. You could do that either by turning off the document body here or going to File, and then Convert to Page Layout. That's going to get rid of the body text and now I've got, under Document, Header and Footer Margins. If I were to change these it's going to change the position of the Header and the Footer but what about the margins? Well, with Page Layout there are no margins! You could put things wherever you want. So if I put a text box here I could keep it within a certain space or I could put it all the way over to the left. Even off the page. The same thing to the right, to the top and bottom. So margins themselves really don't mean anything. You could do whatever you want. If I go back to standard word processing the same is actually true for individual elements. Whether it's a text box like this you could see I could put it wherever I want. It's not stuck in-between the margins. The same would be true for images or for shapes. I could put them wherever I want. So if the idea is to have a different margin on another page because you want to have a large image you don't need to actually even use the margins for that. Just place the image where you want. 
But let's say that you're using Page Layout and you kind of want to impose margins on yourself. Well you could do that using Guides. So since I've already turned Rulers on, and again you would do that here, I could go ahead and add Guides. There's a menu choice here where you could hide them. So you want to make sure they are not hidden. What I could do is I could drag over from the left ruler any vertical guide. So say if I wanted to kind of set myself a limit of one inch here on the left and maybe one inch here on the right. I could drag down from the top or a horizontal line. So I could set myself a guide here. Then I could use this to snap items to it, like for instance a text box, you could see how it snaps to it. I don't have to obey it. I can actually move things outside of there. But if I'm self-imposing margins on my document I could make sure I always fall within these guides. I could add as many other guides as I want. I could add a center guide. Maybe I could add a guide that's a little bit closer in for some element or further out for others. I could create as many guides as I need.
So on Page Layout documents there aren't really any margins. They are just settings that the Header and the Footer will obey. Margins in a word processing document only really apply to the body text. Any other element that you want to add can be placed anywhere. Note under Document, Document you actually have placing for the Header and the Footer and these will obey the document margins. These are independent vertically of the document margins. So I can change the document margin there. You can see the Header doesn't move. But they do depend on the left and the right margins that determines not only the Body Text but the width of the Header and Footer.
So I hope that gives you some insight on using Margins in Pages. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 7 Responses to “How To Adjust Margins In Mac Pages”

nick

3 years ago

hi Gary, I remember in MS Word, using a Hanging Paragraph where the first line goes to full margins, and the rest of the paragraph is indented by a set amount. Is the equivalent in Pages to just set the margin for the first line? thx

Gary Rosenzweig

nick: Look under indents. There is "first" before "left" and "right."

Kathy

Hi Gary, excellent as always. Thank you! I have a pdf of a covid card that isn't the proper size for a wallet. Is it possible using pages to change the size of an off size rectangular shape to a size that would fit in a wallet? My issue is trying to change the length of the 'card' independent of the width. I tried opening the pdf in preview but that didn't help me (likely user error I'm sure). Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. :)

Kathy: With the image selected, go to the Format sidebar, then Arrange, then look for Constrain proportions and switch that off.

Wow that did the trick! Thanks so much!! You are a delight Gary. Oh yes, I wanted to tell you how much I'm enjoying your Podcast with Leo Notenboom called TEH Podcast. Thanks for that too.

Pam Poole

I have a MacBook Air laptop. I want my right margin to be even or somewhat even. Currently it types out to the end of the screen then returns to the left. Thank you. Simple does it.

Pam: So is the right margin at the right edge of the page, or the right edge of your screen? Use the Zoom control at the top of the window to "Fit Width" to see.

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How To Adjust Margins In Mac Pages

Comments: 7 Responses to “How To Adjust Margins In Mac Pages”

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