How do I change the shape of the Font palette?

The Font palette or Font panel, that little friendly window that comes up when you press ⌘-T, has a surprising number of possible shapes. Some you can get by simply resizing the window from the lower right corner.

Drag up left:


Drag up right:


Drag down left:


Drag down right:


And then access the wheel menu, where you can show "Preview" and "Effects":

With Preview:


With Preview and Effects buttons:


You can also mix them to some unusual but perhaps useful combinations, like Preview in a really small window.

How do I change kerning in Pages?

You cannot, and that is mostly a good thing. However, you can change tracking using the Inspector > T > Text > Spacing > Character. And that is probably what you want to do anyhow.

The following paragraphs are just there to get the terminology right. If you do not care about the terminology, you can skip the rest of this posting.

Tracking is a fairly simple thing. It is just the space between the characters.

Kerning, on the other hand, is a property that is built into the font itself. It defines how certain characters are adjusted when they stand next to each other.

The two bottom fields in the picture above show kerning and tracking in Adobe InDesign. Here the kerning is shown as -37 within brackets - the default value for kerning between W and A in this font. Nothing is changed by the writer. The tracking is 100 - also the default.

As W and A lean in the same direction, they can stand slightly closer than for exampel W and T without touching each other. -37 expresses how much closer they can be according to the font designer.

Between A and T, the default kerning is -74. The font designer decided that they could get even closer to each other.

However, between T and E, the default kerning is 0. There would be no advantage pushing them closer together, as they already are very close on the top part.

Usually the default values are good, and you would not like to change them.

However, if you really feel you need to change the kerning instead of the tracking, you can use TextEdit. To see how it works yourself, create a new document with just two lines:

WA
TER

Highlight the text and go to the menu Format > Font > Kern > Use Default. Now look carefully at the letters and go to Format > Font > Kern > Use None. You will see that WA changes, but not TER, where there is no default kerning.

The same trick does not work in Pages, where the similar menu is Format > Font > Tracking, and the options are None, Tighten and Loosen. This is just a round about way to do the same thing as in the Inspector - tracking.

Pages adjusts tracking - not kerning. And to most of us tracking is just what we need.

How do I see what my fonts look like?

From Pages '09, you can see WYSIWYG font previews in the Format Bar font menu. Just make sure that you have the preferences right: Pages > Preferences > Show font preview in Format Bar font menu. To switch between WYSIWYG and standard font names, hold down the alt-key, as you click on the menu.

In previous versions this was not possible, but there were some other options that worked fairly well - some would say better.

Use the Font palette header

Follow these steps:

1. Display the Font palette using ⌘-T or the menu Format > Fonts > Show Fonts.
2. Click on the wheel in the lower left corner and choose "Show Preview".
   

You will get a preview of the currently highlighted font.

To easily scroll between the fonts, first put your cursor in the search field. This will take the focus away from your main document. Then highlight a font and scroll up and down with the arrow keys.

Use the Font palette Favorites


Select the collection "Favorites". It lists the latest font families you used, and it shows them in the last used Typeface and Size.

Use an Apple Script

Follow these steps:

1. In the Finder, go to Applications and open Font Book.
2. In Font Book, highlight all fonts (or the ones you are curious about).
3. In the Finder, go to Applications > AppleScript > Example Scripts > Font Book and double click on Create Font Sample.scpt. It will open in Script Editor.
4. In Script Editor click on "Run".
5. Wait.

After some time, you will have a document in TextEdit that contains samples of all your Typefaces in all your fonts. Save it for future reference.

Use Font Book

Font Book is an important tool for at least two purposes. One - display what your fonts look like. Two - organise your fonts.

The main reason Apple has not included WYSIWYG font displays in Pages or the Font Palette is that it would be next to impossible with all the fonts we have today. You would have to scroll for ever - up and down, looking for a font that fits your needs. You would forget the name of one you saw and you would have to start over again.

WYSIWYG font menus worked on the first Macs, when the average user had no more than six fonts, but today the average user has several hundreds.

If you are serious about finding the most perfect font in this hay stack, use Font Book collections. It does not cost anything, and they are easy to remove, when no longer needed.

Create a collection for for example sans serif fonts, another for good body text fonts, another for Chinese fonts, and so on. It will be much easier to compare Monaco and Andale Mono, if they are in the same small collection, than if you have to scroll 150 fonts to get from one to the other. For more hints how to create collections, check this post.

Which of Pages' methods to create PDF files should I use?

If you prioritize a small file, use Share > Export > PDF (Good) or PDF (Better). "Good" means roughly 72 dpi for the embedded images. "Better" means roughly 150 dpi. Images will lose quality, but it should be acceptable for display on a computer screen.

If you prioritize high quality graphics, use Print > PDF > Save to PDF or Share > Export > PDF (Best). These two methods seem virtually identical. Graphics included in the document keep the original quality and resolution.

There is no difference between any of the methods for text and inserted shapes. They are vector graphics and keep their infinite resolution.

If you will send the PDF off for professional printing you can try one of two options.

• Print to PDF/X. This is supposed to produce a file with colour profiles that a printer can handle correctly. See further information.
• Print to PostScript and then convert the postscript file to PDF - preferably using Adobe Acrobat. In some (or all?) cases this produces a file that is easier to colour separate. See further information.

(Note: The "Share" menu mentioned above was called "File" before Pages '09.)

For information about some of the features that Pages supports in PDF files, see this post.


On the left a 300% view of a picture scaled to fit one square inch in Pages. In the middle, the same Pages file exported as "Good" PDF. The loss of quality is clearly visible at 300% magnification. To the right is the result of a "Preflight" in Adobe Acrobat. The image dimensions are 73/73 pixels.

EGWORD (removed article)

The comparison with Egword is removed, as Egword no longer exists as an application. For those who are curious, the comparison is still available here.

Helvetica Narrow problems

With Mac OS X 10.5, Leopard, some users report problems with Helvetica Narrow appearing as substitute font for Helvetica. There are couple of things you can try to fix the problem.

* The obvious thing is to delete Helvetica Narrow. Also look for "N Helvetica Narrow", which may be stored in one of the font folders. Spotlight search for the fonts, to be sure to find all instances.

* Disable Helvetica Narrow. That seems to have worked for some people, but not for everyone.

* Install Helvetica a second time, but this time to your User library or /Library/Fonts. You can find the font using Spotlight. Drag it to your User library or /Library/Fonts or use Font Book. If you get a warning about a conflict, choose "Allow Conflict". (This is not a very clean solution, but it has worked for some people.)

* Disable all your User fonts - just in case.

* Remove all System 9 fonts from /Library/Fonts. You can recognise them as they appear with a size of zero.


For other font problems and suggested solutions see deleting font cache and missing fonts.

Update 29 May 2008: The updated version of Mac OS X, 10.5.3, is said to fix the Helvetica Narrow problem.

How do I import a LAB image to Pages?

CIELAB colours are mostly used to edit pictures, but in some cases one might want to include an image that uses the LAB colour space to Pages.

Pages 3.0 usually imports Photoshop PSD files, but for some reason, it fails with PSD files using LAB colour space.

The solution is to save the image as TIFF. It maintains the colour space and it displays fine in Pages.

There is one restriction however: Instant Alpha does not work on imported LAB TIFF files. The solution is to add transparency in the TIFF file itself before import.

Which are the document types used by Pages in Applescript?

The document types used by Pages under Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) are defined in the Pages package Content/Info.plist under the tags CFBundleDocumentTypes > [a number] > CFBundleTypeName. They are the following ones:

• SLDocumentTypeRichText
• SLDocumentTypeRichTextBundle (rtfd)
  
• SLDocumentTypePlainText
• SLDocumentTypeSimpleText
• SLDocumentTypeMSWord
• SLDocumentTypePDF
• SLDocumentTypeAppleWorks

Not all of them can be used in Applescript to export documents. There are the same limitations as for Export using the Share > Export dialogue. To see how they can be used, see this example.

My fonts in Leopard are crazy. How do I reset the font cache?

In the best of all possible worlds, you should never have to reset the font cache, but Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) seems to have some stability issues with fonts, which sometimes appear missing, even though you can see them in Font Book. If you have serious font problems, you can try the following. It is (probably) risk free if you follow the instructions exactly, but if you do not follow them to the letter, you may damage something in your system.

Therefore you should only follow these instructions in two cases:

• You understand them perfectly, and you know what they are doing.
• You are desperate because of some font problems.

Here are the steps:
1. Open Terminal.
2. Type the following two commands:

cd `getconf DARWIN_USER_CACHE_DIR`
open ..

3. In the Finder window that appears, drag the folders -Caches-, -Tmp- and TemporaryItems to the Trash, if they exist.
4. Restart. You may get a message that the boot cache is being rebuilt.

Once you have restarted, your font problem may be gone.

For other font problems, see missing fonts and Helvetica Narrow.