Pages on iOS: Where to find character styles

Following up from the previous post about Pages here on Medium, I want to pay more attention to character styles, this time on iOS. My usual set of character-level formatting definitions is as follows:

– italics
– bold
– small caps
– all caps
– code
– link
– some colour in bold, if needed

In more capable applications, such as Nisus Writer Pro and InDesign, I end up having more italic styles, for different languages, and a no-break style, which can be used at the end of the typesetting tasks, when one wants to hone weird-looking ends of lines (fig. 1).

Figure 1. Example of two extremely short lines caused by the lack of hyphenation in Catalan on MacOS.

As for Pages on iOS, char styles are hidden three levels deep in the user interface. The steps to get to them are the following:

1. When in text mode, tap on the three-point button, under the typeface name (fig. 2).
2. Here, tap on the character style (the default name is “none”) to get to the list of the ones available (fig. 3). All the character-level formats you can see under this name are local, meaning they are not controlled by any style.

Figure 2. First level under the main control panel for type parameters.

Figure 3. Second level in the control panel in type mode.

On the list of char styles, the user can see whether the selected text has some format not included in the style: an “update” button shows up on the right of the name (fig. 4). Here is also possible to create a new style, by tapping on “Edit” and then on the plus sign (fig. 5).

Figure 4. Interface that allows the user to update a style.

Figure 5. Interface for creating a new style.

And finally a piece of advice for those with some typographic knowledge or mere eagerness for perfection: real small caps cannot be invoked in Pages on iOS. The “small caps” we see under the char style name are an emulation (see, again, fig. 3), that is, a reduction of capitals by a percentage. The result of this parameter is a set of shabby shrunk caps. We only can overcome this limitation by previously setting a proper small caps style on the Mac.