Convert text book to frame?

Thanks, Peggy. As I feared! At your suggestion, I have left feedback for the Pages team.

Apologies! I must add something that I had temporarlly forgotten to this. It is that if I open a new blank document in Pages and click near the top of the page, there is there just such a text box or place-holder, fixed in position, empty, but allowing typing and editing. How did that get there? Doesn't that suggest that in some way it should be possible to create a similar place-holder elsewhere in the document?

Thanks, both of you. No, all I was trying to do was to create my own template for my letters, with my own letterhead.

But I have now got a real disaster on my hands. I can no longer save anything or print from Pages, whether from a template or a blank document. I get a message saying that I do not have permission. I have no similar trouble with any other application on my hard disk.

The message tells me to select the item in the Finder and change permissions, but I cannot select it until it is saved. What can I do? If, on the assumption that Pages has got corrupted, I want to download another copy, I woud have to pay for it again, presumably.

PS: Please ignore my cri de coeur! I have cracked it. It wasn't any damage to Pages. It had something mysterious to do with the folder into which I was trying to save Pages documents. I have now deleted that folder and all seems to be well.

Thanks, Barry. That folder and a couple of files in it had been created in my virtual Snow Leopard Server (in Parallels) and transferred to my host machine's desktop, so that was probably how the problem arose.

As far as replacing possibly corrupted Pages is concerned, that is now unnecessary, since the culprit was the folder. But for future reference, here is the relevant part of my list of purchases. As you will see, against 'Pages' it says 'Installed' on the right (greyed out and inoperative). If I click on 'Pages' itself on the left, I am taken back to the Pages page (pardon the pun) on which I am invited to pay for a new copy. It doesn't cost much, of course, but with most apps downloaded from the Net one gets a serial number and one can then if necessary download another copy and re-insert that number. I looked at all this last night, before posting here. Am I right in guessing that I would have to uninstall Pages before the link on the Purchases page becomes active?

Thanks, PeterBreis0807. As far as the letter template is concerned, I did have a look at some of the existing templates with a view to modifying one, but in fact I have created the one I want from scratch now — all except for the text box. I shall either do without that, or use an inline text box (when I have discovered how to create one).

Thanks especially for the reminder about repairing permissions in Disk Utility. I used to do that regularly on my old computer, but in the panic of thinking that Pages had got corrupted I failed to think of it.

Thanks very much for the instructions. They are just the help I wanted.

What the text box is for? Well, just a whim, really. But on my old computer with AppleWorks I set up a letter template with my preferred font, paragraph spacing, etc., for the body of the letter; and then at top left, just below the letter head, I placed a locked text frame for the addressee's address with its own (different) paragraph spacing. It wasn't a vital matter, but it saved quite a lot of time. That's what I would like to reproduce in Pages, though it is by no means a matter of epistolatory life or death.

Good ways, Peter,

and less good ones:

If I put the address into the header, it will come out on every page, will it not? (Not so good). And an uneditable pdf? (not good at all in a template for letters to be addressed to different people.) And as far as a link to the Contacts (Address Book) is concerned, I have to write to all sorts of people and organizations that aren't in my Contacts. But I tried the inline text box and didn't like it for various reasons, so I shall abandon the idea and just type in the address and set my line spacing as and when.

But I now have another Pages question, and that is: how can I set the font for footnotes (in a single document or in a template) so that they all appear in that font automatically and I don't have to change the font for each new footnote manually? Mine come out in Helvetica all the time — and Helvetica is fine for some purposes, but I don't like it for all.