can I increase the height of a font without increasing the width?

No, you have to find a font that meets your needs.

Amy,

If you are making a graphic, you can make it usin the normal font proportions, then trun off the Constrain feature in the Metrics inspector and stretch only the vertical dimension of the graphic.

Jerry

Normally that is not the way it is done. You alter the width, not the height.

Either way Pages takes a purist view of fonts and sticks with the designed proportions as distorting the font really is ugly. There are font families that have full range of weights and widths designed into them such as Helvetica, universe and many others.

Otherwise make a Textbox to type into copy and switch to Preview.app and go command n (new) then save that as PDF or copy and paste it back into Pages as a stretchable graphic.

Peter

Peter,

What is the advantage of compressing the horizontal rather than expanding the vertical?

Jerry

Visually none, but that is the way all software does it otherwise you would be chasing your tail trying to work out what the point size of the font was, which then leads to issues with the leading etc. Text is a string calculated as a ribbon flowing left to right, top to bottom, altering the ribbons width (the type's height) would require a recursive calculation that would make an already complex layout task even more complex.

Slight condensing or expansion of fonts is a trick that used to be used in DTP to fit awkward line breaks, but never more than a percentage or two. It is amazing just how the eye picks up subtle changes in the "color" of the type.

Apple seems to have had a change of heart on this as their prior official font was in fact Garamond condensed to 82%, which was in turn created as an official font that required no compression. It probably looked OK as it was an elegant serif font with nicely adjusted thickening and thinning of the strokes that wasn't mangled by compression, unlike Times and the many other PC fonts given "The Treatment". Particularly ugly are the stretched geometric sans serf fonts one sees commonly butchered by wannabee DTPers.

Peter

Peter,

Good explanation - thanks.

Jerry

Given a lazy week Jerry I might add a Design section to my iWorkTipsnTricksBlog.

Robin Williams' The Mac is Not a Typewriter is now out of date, if not totally out of print, but there is a huge market out there for the basics, more so than ever.

It'll have to wait though, currently I'm planning a trip to Broken Hill. Because its there… and I've never been. Been around the world a few times, even been to West and North Australia, but still haven't been out west in NSW.

Probably because it is harder to get to than the rest of the world. 🙂 No way NSW is one of the bigger states in Australia but it is still 1200 km from Sydney to B.H.

Peter