New Text Fill Options In Pages and Keynote

The new versions of Pages, Numbers and Keynote allow you to fill text using a gradient or an image. You can use linear or radial gradients of two or more colors, change the angle and other options. You can fill with an image stretching that image to fit the text or tiling it across the text. You can also use a new feature to outline text with a line, choosing the line color, style and size.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at the new text fill features in Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. You can create text that looks like this now.
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So there are new versions of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote and they have a few new features. One of those, across all three apps, is the ability to fill text with either a gradient or an image. This is somewhat useful in Pages but I see it as mostly being the big new feature for Keynote where having colorful interesting text is a big plus.
So to get these new features you want to make sure you're using version 8.1 of Pages. I've got some sample text here. Now it only makes sense to fill text with a gradient or an image if it's kind of like title text. It doesn't make any sense to do body text with that. So we'll select the title here and I'm actually going to make it a thicker font. So it's nice and thick and we have some area inside the letters that we can fill. You'll see here Text Color, which is what you had before, but there's now a little menu. You can go from Text Color to other options.
So let's go to the first one, Gradient Fill, and as soon as I do that you can see that the text here goes from a light blue at the top to dark blue at the bottom. You can see those two colors here. I can select new colors to change that and change it to whatever I want. I can even this little color wheel here and change it to any color in the spectrum. You can change the angle so you can have it come from a different angle. You can just have it go straight up and down, left to right, and you can set the angle manually there as well. Another option is to Apply the gradient to the whole page. But right now it goes from one color at one side of the text to the other color at the other side of the text. If I apply gradient to the whole page then the one color starts at the left side of the page and the other goes to the right side of the page.
Now I'm going to switch to Keynote because I think this stuff makes a lot more sense when you're in Keynote. If you have a presentation you're going to have some big text up on the screen and you want to use the Gradient Fill, for instance, to make it really standout. It's the same thing here. It's the same stuff on the side. You select Text in the sidebar. You've got this menu here. Before it was just plain Text Color. Now you have Gradient Fill. You can set the same things. 
You can also go to Advanced Gradient Fill and this allows you to set more than one color stop. So you have a light blue to dark blue. I can click down here and select another color. So I can say, well in the middle I want it to go yellow in the middle there. That can standout like that. I can move these around and even adjust how quickly it goes from one color to another. So you can do all sorts of interesting things. You can also go to a Radial Gradient. So you can see it radiates from the center out. Like before you can apply to the entire object or to just the text inside that object. So if you're putting text inside of the text box it goes to the edge of the text box or goes to the edge of the text itself. So you have a lot more options under the Advanced Gradient Fill. Lots of cool things that you can do.
Next we have Image Fill. Image Fill is going to go this default kind of a noise fill here and give you some options. But before we change those options I'm going to go and bring in a different fill here. I'm going to drag and drop a color into here or I can use this Choose button. What I've done here is I've chosen an image that is a tile. This is something I've downloaded from a ClipArt site and you can see here it tiles this leaf. So you can tile this as much as you want. This will be useful for using all the settings here.
So we have Scale to Fill so the image goes from left to right all the way across. We can do Original Size so it would just fit in this box in the middle and that leaves out parts of the text. You would use that if you had the image inside exactly like you wanted. You can Stretch it so it stretches horizontally and vertically. It doesn't look good since it's a square image but it's a rectangular piece of text there. You can do Scale to Fill or Scale to Fit. So Scale to Fill is going to make sure it fills the entire space. Where Scale to Fit it's only going to fit it vertically or whatever the smallest dimension is so you can see I just get this square in the middle since this is a square texture.
Tile allows me to actually have the pattern repeat. So at  100% it's not that exciting. But if I can move it down you can see, since it's a nice tiled image and the image would have to be created as a tiled image for this to work, I can have a nice effect here. I can also go and switch from Image Fill to Advanced Image Fill. What this does is this gives me the ability to tint the image. I have these colors and I can tint it. So I'll tint it a green here which works really nice for this pattern. I can go and change how much the tint is by clicking on the color wheel here and not clicking a color but just changing the opacity here. So I can get a nice effect here even if the image isn't the perfect color when it starts.
In addition to be able to fill the text with an image another new option is you can click here under Advanced Option for the text and there's a checkbox for Outline. That's not new. That was there before. What happens when you check it is new. You check it and now you get some options. Before it just added an outline. You had no options. Now you can actually set the color. So I can set it to be, say, dark green in this case. I can change the size of the outline. I can make the outline a little bit bigger like that. I can also change the line style. So some things wouldn't make sense like doing the dots here. But this actually creates kind of a nice look using this line style. You can play around with this to create a nice effect here on the text.
You can see here the result of using image with an outline I created something a little bit more unique than just a solid colored text. Now you could also use this in conjunction with text styling. So you have Styles here. I could click here and add a new paragraph style. Call it Green Title. Then I can apply that down here. So I can pick this subtitle here and I can change it to Green Title and you can see it uses the same settings including the fill and the outline.

Comments: 5 Responses to “New Text Fill Options In Pages and Keynote”

Bob

5 years ago

Thanks Gary.
It’s a great post.
I just tweeted it.

Louise Kienast

I tried out all of these new features. Your presentation gave me even more ideas. Thanks. Have you tried using the apply gradient to entire page? I don't see any change to the page even when I used the advanced gradient choice and added the text to the entire page. The background color of the page did not change. Am I missing something?

Gary Rosenzweig

Louise: Yes, definitely. Try placing several pieces of text in different boxes at different positions. Make them all gradient fills. Then set them each to "entire page" and you'll see. I show it in the video too.

On the Pages What's New in Pages website it states: Apply a gradient to an entire page or object. I thought the background of the entire page would change. I can see the change in the text itself, but nothing shows up in the page background. The website instructions aren't clear.

Louise: That just means the way the gradient fills the text can depend on the text object or the size of the page. If you want to fill the page with a gradient, you could have always done that by just creating a square shape, stretching it to fill the page, using a gradient fill on the shape and moving it to the background with no text wrap. You can also use page masters. See: https://macmost.com/how-to-change-the-background-color-in-mac-pages.html

Comments Closed.

New Text Fill Options In Pages and Keynote

Comments: 5 Responses to “New Text Fill Options In Pages and Keynote”

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