New Default Font Preference in Mac Pages

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at the new default font feature in Pages.

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So we're looking at Pages version 8.2 for Mac which was released on September 30th. This version has some new features. You'll see this pop-up the first time that you launch Pages version 8.2 but you can go to Help and then What's New in Pages. The main new feature here is Set Default Font and Font Size. That's what we're going to look at.

If we go to Pages Preferences we can look here and see this new feature. It is under Default Font right here. So we'll select it and it's going to come up with this little menu here where we can choose a Font and Font Size. It will tell us that this will only work for the Basic templates and it's going to affect the Body paragraph style and other styles will adjust accordingly. So we look at what that means. So here's the default font. Let's change to something else. 

Say we're going to go with Minion Pro and maybe something a little bit bigger. So we'll say okay. We see it now appear here and we have a Change button to go back in and change it further. Let's create a new document. We'll use Blank. Now we'll test it out and we see it is, indeed, Minion Pro. We can see over here under Format, Style Minion Pro, Body Text, and if we look at all the styles we see that they are all Minion Pro. So what's going on there? These Styles take their cues from Body Text. So Body Text starts off by defining a font, a size, other things like that. Then all these other styles are variations of it.

So if we were to change this to Title you can see it's Minion Pro but it's bold, 33 pt. So that going to happen with pretty much any font you set. It's going to take that font and then apply throughout all of the different styles. Which is great. So let's close this document and change the preferences again. This time let's change it to 16 pt. Now we'll create a new document and when we do we can see here that Body Text is 16 pt now. If I go to Title, it's 44 pt. So what it's doing there is saying okay the Body Text is larger by a certain percentage over the default so let's make the Title larger by that same amount.

Let's try changing it again here with this document still open. We'll go and change it and do, say, Helvetica, 18 pt and you'll see it doesn't change this document. This document is already created. But if we create a new document and then we choose the blank template you can see we're using Helvetica 18 pt. If we change the Title style you can see that's all the way at 49 pt now. It only changes for new documents, of course. Also it says it's only for the Basic template. So here's Basic. We can actually focus in on just the Basic and there are three. Just Basic blank, blank landscape, and the Note Taking template. These are the three that will then be affected by that setting.

Now there are other small new features in Pages. The biggest one is under View. There's a new Go To menu and you can go to Next Page, Previous Page, First Page, Last Page, and Control Command G and then you type a page number. None of these are highlighted right now because I don't have any text in here. Let me add some.

Okay. So now I want to go to View. You can see Go To and you can see Next, Last, and Page. I can choose a page number, say 3. Now you can see I've got Previous Page and First Page are there. These menu items are kind of hard to get to, View, Go To, and then these but since they are there you can now set keyboard shortcuts in System Preferences for them which is really nice.

In addition to those new features you can also now add text descriptions to videos, audio, drawings, and even image galleries. This is useful if you need to include text with those objects for when you export to PDF. So those with Accessibility features turned on can hear descriptions of those items.

I should also note that the new Go To page feature is available also in Keynote. Of course there it's Go To, Slide.