Basic Newsletter Layout in Pages

Learn how to use Pages for basic page layout tasks. You can place text and image elements to create projects like newsletters and sales sheets. By placing guides you can easily place items that line up. You can link text boxes together so the text flows from one to the other. You can add captions and other elements.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: So let's take a look at doing some basic page layout using the latest version of Pages version 6.2. So in the template you can see near the bottom some examples of some layouts. Let's say you wanted to do something like this but starting from scratch. 
So let's start with Blank and we have our Pages document here. Now the first thing we're going to do is we're going to go into Document and then turn off Document Body. That will convert it to a Page Layout document. Now we're going to go under View and Show Rulers. So now we can see what we've got here. Let's expand the window a little bit so we can see that we've got the edges. It's a 8 1/2  by 11 sheet of paper which is what we want. We want to add some guides so we can see where we're doing layouts. We're going to be doing 1/2 inch margins so I'm going to add a 1/2 inch here on the left. It's hard to get it perfect but you can and a 1/2 inch here on the right. The same thing on the top. Adding guides like this is going to make it much easier to do what we need. 
We're going to do a two column layout here. A two column layout would put the middle at 4 1/4 here. So let's say we'll do 4.1 for the right side of the left column and we will do 4.4 for the right side there.  Now we've got everything set so we can start our layout.
Let's start with the headline at the top of this newsletter. I'm going to hit Text for text box. I'm going to snap this here to the guide and stretch it across and type some text. I'm going to select it all and then go to Format and I'm going to set the Style to Title. It's important to use Styles for something like this because if we want to change say the font of all the headlines throughout the newsletter if they were all set to one style then we can do that very easily.
Now to get it just right I'm going to center it and I'm going to use Command Plus and Command Minus to change the font size. I want to get it just the right size there so it fits across. Now another thing I want to do is I want to go to Arrange here and set the Text Wrapping to None because I'm going to custom place everything here so I don't want Text Wrapping to get in the way. I'm going to shrink this a little bit here and I'm ready to add some more text. 
I'll add another text box and I'll stick this here on the left and let's have it go down to about here. Text Wrapping to None. Let's insert some text here. I have a little widget here that will give me some sample text. So we've got some sample text and we can see it fills the space and then some. So it goes all the way down to here. Let's add even more text. Great. So now I want it to wrap over here but I want to put a photo here. So let's drag a photo in, just dragged and dropped it from the Finder. I'm going to shrink it down and I'm going to Style it with a little bit of a border, like that. Shrink it so it fits within the guides here and kind of align it towards the top. I'm also going to change the Arrangement for this to None. So I can move it close to the top here. 
Then I'll kind of align these. See how it kind of snaps to each other there. That's great. I'm going to put a caption under this so let's put another text box. Also set the Arrangement to nothing there so nothing thing wraps. So a little picture caption. It turns out there is a default Caption style. I'll use that and I'll use that for all of my captions. I'll align that there to the top and maybe, to be nice, I'll center it there. 
Now I want this to wrap underneath so I'm going to put another text box here and set it up and now I need to link these two. So what I'm going to do is select both of them. So I select the first one, Command select the second one and you can see I've got these dots here at the top. So I'll click on this first dot and I'm going to have to Command click again on this here to select it. Click on the second dot. One and two. They're both green. So they wrap. So I can now shrink this here together it to fit. Let's say I want it to go to about here.
So that looks good. Let's do another headline. To make it easier to do things I'm going to Option drag things like headlines. So I can just copy by Option dragging. So I'll copy that. More text there. To make that smaller I'm going to Command minus to make that fit. That looks good. Shrink this up a bit. Let's create another text box. Stick it down here right underneath. Set that arrangement to None. Let's insert some text in here. Do some more sample text and I'm going to Option drag to copy this. Now what I want to do is I want to clear this out. I'm going to click on that dot there at the top. Command click here to select it and then click there. Now this flows from one to the other. I'm also going to bring in another image here. Drop that in. Shrink that down and stick that here. I can play with the arrangement for that as well but I'll just leave it at automatic. That looks really nice.
I'm going to create a second page now. So let's turn on Thumbnails so I can see this here. I'm going to Insert Page. Unfortunately with the second page here I have to set the guides again. I'm going to go in here and set those same guides. Now add a text box here so I can continue the articles form the previous page. Set the arrangement to None. I can click here on the top and it will continue from this article. I don't want it to continue from that article so I'm going to click it again and pick the right color there and it continues from the first article. It will be nice if I can actually put something, kind of like that caption, where I just put a piece of text here and say like Big Headline Continued. Then maybe I'll create my own format here. So let's make this Bold and something like that and just some basics like that and I'll create a New Style here and call it Continued and then I could use that as well here. So I'll Option drag up here. Shrink this column and say Continued on Next Page like that. I'll do one of these down here as well and I will select these both. Option drag over here (I only selected one). There we go. I will have this one continued so Small Headline Continued. Of course, these could fill up the rest of the page there. 
You get the basic idea of how to do this. The nice thing with these headlines and with the captions and everything being the same style is now I could go and say oh I don't want those to be, you know, that font. I want it to be another font and then I could update the Style and you can see it updated it down here. It's a nice way to do newsletters pretty quick. It didn't take me that long. You could do a lot with them. Put another half hour into this and you can perfect it and get it looking just like you want.

Comments: 5 Responses to “Basic Newsletter Layout in Pages”

Shirley

7 years ago

I'm surprised you didn't do a full alignment in the text narrative. I'd also suggest after you do one newsletter to use File Menu> Duplicate so you have the newsletter all set up for the next issue or set your guide lines and then save as a template.

Gary Rosenzweig

Shirley: Good ideas!

Ruth Jessop

For me you spoke and acted much too quickly - maybe I missed something in the Pages lectures about some things

Jean-Claude

Is there no way to set up guides for the entire document instead of recreating guides on each new page?

Jean-Claude: That's right.

Comments Closed.

Basic Newsletter Layout in Pages

Comments: 5 Responses to “Basic Newsletter Layout in Pages”

Welcome to MacMost

Free Weekly Newsletter

MacMost Online Courses

Keyboard Shortcuts PDF

Connect with MacMost

MacMost Sections

Popular Tutorials

Information