Pages: Finally a default body style that includes space after

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Pages
February 4th, 2005 • 5:51 am

I have started using Pages and will be reporting on various issues as I encounter them.

The first thing I want to note is how appreciative I am of the fact that the default “Body” style used by Pages as the default style for body text in a document actually includes a default setting of 12 points of spacing after each paragraph.

The importance of this should not be underestimated. There are tens of millions of word processor users out there who still use double returns (i.e. two consecutive carriage return characters) to create spacing between paragraphs of text. This is the source of all kinds of pagination problems both for word processor users themselves and for graphic designers who import these word processor documents into page layout applications such as Adobe InDesign.

One hopes that, by including a default body style that includes 12 points of spacing after each paragraph, Apple will help teach word processor users everywhere that this is the appropriate way to create spacing after a paragraph.

Indeed, one hopes that this will help make more word processor users aware of the fact that there exists a paragraph formatting setting usually called “spacing after” that is used for such purposes. In my opinion, part of the problem is that the vast majority of word processor users is not even aware that such a feature exists.

In Pages, the feature is easily accessible (in a tab in the Inspector palette) and the inclusion of a 12 point value for spacing after in the default body style will undoubtedly lead people to wonder where this spacing comes from and how it can be adjusted, if needed.

The default bullet list style, on the other hand, does not include any spacing after, which makes sense if you use the bullet style to format lists of short items (i.e. each item consists of a single word or short phrase).

If you want to use the bullet list to format a list of items that are longer (entire paragraphs), then you can easily change the bullet style definition to include some spacing after (or create another bullet style).


2 Responses to “Pages: Finally a default body style that includes space after”

  1. mricart says:

    In fact I think space *before* is much better. Think about a paragraph followed by bullets. Bullets have no space before nor after, so the first bullet will be close to the paragraph, like this:
    ———————————————————————–

    This is the first paragraph with a list bullet:
    ? first bullet
    ? second bullet

    This is a second paragraph.
    ———————————————————————–
    Having space after would give this:
    ———————————————————————–
    This is the first paragraph with a list bullet:

    ? first bullet
    ? second bullet
    This is a second paragraph.

    ———————————————————————–
    We have been debating a lot internally about that, and I could finally convince all my colleages that space before was better.

    What do you think?

  2. Pierre Igot says:

    It’s a valid point. The trouble is that there are probably as many situations where space before makes more sense than space after as there are where the opposite is true. For one thing, if you want text to be properly aligned along the top of the page over several pages (especially if you are using double-sided printing), then space before for the body of the document will be a problem, because pages that begin with a new paragraph won’t be aligned with pages that begin in the middle of a paragraph. Alignment at the top of the page is definitely much more important than alignment at the bottom…

    And then there is the option of using 6 pts of space before and 6 pts of space after :).

    I don’t think there’s a perfect solution for this. I think you need to find what works best in your environment. A really advanced word processor would have “smart” behaviours that would adjust themselves depending on the context/pagination, etc. But we are not quite there yet.

    Anyway, as I said, just the fact that Pages uses some kind of paragraph spacing by default is a good thing.

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