Setting Pages Margins and Paper Size

You can easily customize the margins of your Pages documents if you need something different than the defaults. You can also select from standard paper sizes or create your own if you use special forms or paper. You can save paper sizes to be used again.

Video Transcript: So let's take a look at how to set margins and page size in Pages. In this example I'm just going to use a standard blank document template. Let's turn some things on so we can really see what we're dealing with here. 
So under View first I want to show the Rulers. So I can see here I've got inches as my measurement. I'm going to also show Layout. You can see the body text here and you can really see that it starts at one inch from the left and there's one inch on the right and there's a full inch at the top and bottom. 
Now switching the margins is really easy. All you need to do is go to the documents sidebar. So click document here. Then go to the document margin section here. So, for instance, if I wanted a 2 inch margin on the left I could just change this number to 2. You can see everything shrinks on the left. Even the header and footer make way for this extra margin. So you can set these to whatever you want.
So setting margins is actually pretty easy. Document size is a little different. Here you've got a printer and paper size at the top and you can select which printer you want. But, you know, it really doesn't matter which printer you use. It's the paper type here that matters. Now notice that you can choose from a bunch of standard paper sizes like in the A4, or US letter, or US legal but you don't have the ability to actually set the numbers here. But you can. 
All you need to do is go to File, then page setup. Here under paper size you can manage custom sizes. So I already have one set. We can create a new one. Hit the plus button and we can give it whatever name we want. So test size. Say you've got paper that is 6 inches by 9 inches.  Then don't worry about the non printable area. That doesn't seem to have too much of an affect in most cases although Apple does suggest setting those to zeros all around if you're having difficulty. But I've never run into a situation where that's come into play. So I hit OK and now you can see my unusual size here. I can select it over here but I first need to go to Switch to Any Printer. So then I can see these custom ones here. I find that if I select a specific printer, at least in my case, things don't show up correctly there. So save to any printer and I can use that custom size or go back to a regular size. 
You can still adjust the document margins as before. This is just basically giving yourself a head start here if you are using an unusual paper size with Pages.

Comments: 3 Responses to “Setting Pages Margins and Paper Size”

Brad Smith

6 years ago

It's a pity that Pages doesn't keep the exact specs when saving this as a template. I like to show the layout lines and boundaries. But it only shows the changed margins.

David Misenko

I tried to use Pages as a publisher using text boxes and pasted photos... every time I would drag a new object onto the page... the existing boxes would jump all over the place... even to the next page... and rearrange them selves even though they were saved.
What am I doing wrong ??? a setting somewhere ? thanks Dave M.

Gary Rosenzweig

David: Are you sure you have the document set to Page Layout and not Body Text? If you are inserting objects into the body text and then have those objects set to wrap so they avoid each other, then I guess it can look like you describe.

Comments Closed.

Setting Pages Margins and Paper Size

Comments: 3 Responses to “Setting Pages Margins and Paper Size”

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