Betalogue

As indicated in another post earlier today, Pages’ default behaviour when it comes to displaying the left margin of a document is a significant screen space waster.

Fortunately, when you scroll horizontally to the right to hide the left margin, and then save your document, Pages preserves the horizontal position.

However, if you save your Pages document as a template to use at the basis for future Pages document, this particular window setting is not preserved. Pages preserves the window’s zoom setting and its overall size, but it does not preserve the horizontal scrolling position.

This means that, every time you create a new Pages document based on your template, Pages opens the document in a new window with the right zoom setting and window size, but the left margin is fully visible and you have to scroll manually to the right to hide it again. And you have to repeat this operation manually for each and every new document you create based on your template.

There is a way to work around this, however. But it means that you won’t be using Pages’ built-in “Templates” feature. Instead, you will do something that’s pretty much equivalent. You create a blank Pages document with all the styles that you need, and with the window zoom setting and horizontal scrolling position that you desire. But then, instead of saving that document as a Pages template, you just save it as a regular Pages document.

Then, in the Finder, you lock the document (in the Information window). And you put it in a folder called “Pages Templates” and you put this folder in your Dock, on the right-hand side.

When you need to create a new Pages document, instead of using Pages’ own “New…” command, which opens the sheet where you have to choose the template on which your new document will be based, you just go to your “Pages Templates” folder in your Dock and select the document you want to use as a template.

Pages will open it as an exist document, i.e. it will preserve its horizontal scrolling position, which is what you wanted. Then you just have to save the document under a new name in the desired location. If you press command-S by accident instead doing “Save As…“, Pages will simply refuse to save the document, because it is locked.

It’s not completely elegant, but it’s the best work-around I have in order to avoid having to adjust the horizontal scrolling position each and every time I create a new document. And it’s not really more cumbersome than having to go through Pages’ own “Choose a template” dialog sheet anyway.

Unfortunately, even this approach doesn’t avoid the problem with Pages scrolling back to the left when you start a new page. But I am afraid there is no way around this particular problem.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Thursday, August 4th, 2005 at 3:15 pm and is filed under Pages. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.