Sunday, January 20, 2008

How do I change the default zoom?

New documents always come up with the same zoom value (the percentage in the lower left corner of the document window). Sometimes that is far too big or far too small, so you may want to change it.

The simplest and safest way is to go to the menu Pages > Preferences, and change the Default Zoom value.

However, you may want to change it to a value that is not in the preferences dialogue, let's say 99%, for the sake of argument.

If you want to change the zoom for the current document only, you can use an AppleScript:

tell window 1 of application "Pages"
set view scale to 99
end tell

If you want to change the default value for all new documents, and you are willing to take a certain risk, you can manually edit the file ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iWork.Pages.plist and set the parameter SLDefaultsPageScale to 0.9900000 (for 99%).

In Mac OS X before 10.7, you can also run the following command in the terminal. (Copy the entire line until 0.99 - not only what is visible. Blogspots HTML hides the end of the line.)
defaults write com.apple.iWork.Pages SLDefaultsPageScale 0.99

4 comments:

Marie said...

Does this work in Lion? I was able to get the script to work but not the default setting in terminal.

Magnus Lewan said...

The "defaults write" command does not seem to work properly. However, manually changing the file works for me.

Anonymous said...

I found a solution by opening Acrobat program (do not open a specific document, though).

Then click on Edit -> Preferences -> Zoom -> 100%

Zoom is the top right option.

Then click OK.

New default is 100%

Anonymous said...

Click Edit -> Preferences -> Zoom

Do this without opening a specific document so it applies to the program and not just one document.