Using Advanced Text Options In Pages

You can go beyond basic font changes or bold text by using advanced text options in Pages, Numbers and Keynote. You can make text stand out with spacing, baseline changes, outlines, shadows or adding a background color.
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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to use Advanced Text Options on your Mac. 
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Now in Pages, Numbers, and Keynote you can select text and change things about it. Change the Font. Change the size, change the style. But there are some advanced options hidden behind a single button in those three apps. So here I am in Pages. Now if I select some text, say here in the body of a word processing document, or if I create a text box and select some text in there I can go to the Format sidebar and then under Style I can change things about the text. For instance I can change the font that's being used. I can change the size and I could change things like the exact style that's used. I have quick access to certain things like Bold and Italics right here. Even underline and strike through. But with this button here I could access advanced text options and there are a bunch of different things I could do.
The first one is pretty basic. Character spacing. So I can increase the spacing between the characters by a percent. So you can see I can create more space or go negative and create less space between the characters. I can also adjust the baseline shift. To show you that let me select one word in here and then I'll use Baseline Shift to shift that text up or down. You do that by a number of points. Now why would you want to do that? Well, there are a variety of reasons. You may just want to have a word standout or sometimes people when they use parentheses with certain words, like here I've got a word where nothing is hanging off the bottom of the text. There's no bottom part like the y here, and it makes the parentheses maybe look like they hang a little too low. I can select the parentheses here and I can baseline shift one point up so the word seems to be a little better centered. It's not something you want to do in your main text. But if you want to create a really nice headline in a newsletter or a title for a paper you may want to adjust the baseline shift for something just a little bit just to get it to look perfect.
You can also kind of create your own fractions this way. So I can do you know 1 / 2. I'm not going to use the little ½ character. But I could baseline shift the 1 up a little bit and the 2 down a little bit to make it look a little bit more like I want. Sometimes people like to use baseline shift to make a word standout by adjusting each letter. So I could take like this letter here and adjust that a up a bunch and I could take this letter here and maybe not quite as much. Maybe this letter here and have it go down a bit. Something like that.
So we also have a setting here for Baseline which allows you to go to Superscript or Subscript. So Superscript moves the letter up and makes it a smaller font size. Subscript will do the same but put it down further. You typically use this when you want to create a footnote or references of some sort, or sometimes in math formulas.
Next we have my favorite one which is Capitalization. So typically you have None. But you could go to All Caps. This changes the text to use all capital letters. But it remembers that some are capital letters and some are lower case. So you could always switch from All Caps back to None to go to your original case and notice it remembers the G and M it remembers are capitalized. So this is a handy way to play around with using All Caps for a title or something without actually having to retype the text. Then is you don't like it having to retype the text again. You can also go Small Caps. This makes everything capital letters but the actual capital letters are a larger size. What Title Case will do is it will capitalize the beginning of each word except for certain words that are traditionally not capitalized in titles. Like here the word the is not capitalized. If you want all words to be capitalized you can go to Start Case and every single word is capitalized.
So the next one is Ligatures and I've switched her to use a Serif font. You can see an example of a ligature here. The f and l are combined into what look like a single character. That's an example of a ligature. By using default the f and l are combined. But if I say, No I don't want to use those, use None you could see how the f and l are now distinct characters. You could also select Use All. So some fonts will have more ligatures if you use All rather than using Default.
Now you have two options here that you can really use to make text standout. So if you use Outline then you've got a separate set of controls here. For the line style you can choose one of the regular styles there. Color. So let's use a color so we can make this standout. You can see there's actually an outline around the text. Then you can have the size of the outline. This works even better when it's a nice big bold font like that. You can even go and click here to set the text color and then set it to white or Nothing and then just be stuck with the outline like that. Then you've also got Shadow. Shadow allows you to set the angle for the shadow there. You could set the color for it. How much it is offset from the text. How much Blur is in the shadow or if it's completely opaque or maybe semi-transparent. So you can do a variety of effects there.
Finally, we've got Text Background. You could use text background to basically create kind of a highlighter effect. So you can set the background to anything that you want. If you click on the color wheel here then in addition to a color you can also make it semi-transparent. So I can make it 50% that color there which would help if there was a background here or an element behind this. It will blend into it.
So I also want to point out that some of these have keyboard shortcuts. If you go to Format, and then Font, you could see here that there's Character Spacing, Ligature, Baseline including Superscript/Subscript and also just increasing the baseline by raising and lowering, and Capitalization. So those options there have items in the Menu Bar and you could either use the existing keyboard shortcuts or assign your own in System Preferences if you use these a lot. But if you want to use Outline or Shadow you've got to access it here in the Format Sidebar. All of these are remembered in Character Styles. So, for instance, if I were to highlight this word here with background like that, if I select it and then click on Character Styles and Add a Character Style then I can apply that Character Style to something else pretty easily. You could see it would use any of those settings in the Advanced Text Options in those Character Styles.
So that's a look at using Advanced Text Options. You could use those in Pages, Numbers, and Keynote for all sorts of text. It's a great way to make your titles look more interesting or words in body text standout.
Using Advanced Text Options In Pages

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