How to Highlight Text in iWork Pages

Unfortunately, unlike Microsoft office, the iWork does not have a dedicated text highlighting tool. However, you can easily simulate text highlighting using iWorks text shadow feature. These instructions will show you how.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

1. 
   Click picture to enlarge

   SELECT THE TEXT YOU WISH TO HIGHLIGHT: On your iWorks Pages document, select the text you wish to highlight. Then click the “Inspector” button at the head of your document and select the graphics tab (It will have a picture of a circle overlapping a square). Click the checkbox next to “Shadow.” Adjust the angle to zero degrees, set the opacity to 100% (unless you want to highlight in black), and choose an offset of 3 pt and a blur of 6 pt. You can then select from multiple colors you wish to highlight with, although darker colors tend to show up best.

2. SAVING YOUR SETTINGS FOR EASY HIGHLIGHTING: iWork Pages will automatically save your setting so that in the future you can simply check the shadow button, select your text, and choose the shadow/highlight color.

3. AN ALTERNATIVE FOR EDITING: If you are using highlighting simply to mark the areas where you plan to return for future editing--and you only need one highlighting color--you may prefer to use the comments tool. Comments allow you to highlight the relevant text and leave yourself a note in the margins. To insert a comment, just select the text or paragraph you wish to comment on, and click the “Comment” button. (You can also insert a comment by selecting the “Insert” drop-down menu and choosing “Comment.” A comment text box will automatically appear in the margin. Just click on it and enter your comment.

4. ONE MORE ALTERNATIVE - TEXT COLOR CODING: While the shadow highlighting is a viable workaround until Mac introduces a dedicated highlighting feature for iWork, it’s not perfect. One other obvious alternative that’s worth mentioning is to change the color of the text itself, instead of highlighting/shadowing the text. This is easy to do on iWork, just click the colors icon at the top of the iWork screen, select the appropriate text, and choose your text color from any of the iWork color palettes.