Pages '08 - Formatting Font menu show actual font styles like Appleworks?

[Karvel]

With the new formatting bar in Pages '08, is there anyway to get it display what the actual fonts look like when displaying the names of them, like Clarisworks (and presumbaly also Appleworks) did in the Font menu on the menu-bar, and as Microsoft Word does.

Also, speaking of MS Word, can anyone explain simply what Paragraph styles, Character styles are, and what use they are to me?* I'm just used to choosing the font and clicking, if needed, the bold/italic/underline buttons and being done with it!


*The button with a lower-case "a" next to the Font menu on the formatting bar seems to offer some of the same options as the regular "B"/"I"/"U" buttons also on the formatting bar ?!

 

[IJ Reilly]

You are meant to use the OSX font palate, which can be set to preview the font.

Character and especially paragraph styles are really important. They allow you to easily make universal changes to your document with just a couple of clicks, by editing the style instead of selecting all of the text which you want to use that style. Let's say you decide that you want your document body to have a 1.5 line spacing instead of 1.2. You simply change one of the paragraphs with the body style to 1.5 in the inspector, then redefine the style to inherit that setting in the style drawer. All done.

The other valuable use of styles is to set up a template with all of the paragraph and character styles you like to use. Now you don't have to make those changes manually every time you start a new document.

 

[Karvel]

Oh dear, I never knew any of this