Use vertical text in Pages on Mac

The ruler and its tab stops always match the direction of a paragraph, so when you turn on vertical text, the ruler changes.

1. Go to the Pages app on your Mac.

2. Open a document, click in the toolbar, click the Document tab, then select the tickbox next to Vertical Text.

   As you type, each new line appears to the left of the one before it. Footnotes appear at the left side of the page.

3. To turn off vertical text, deselect the tickbox next to Vertical Text.

When you turn on vertical text in the Document  sidebar, all new objects also use vertical text. You can switch the text direction of one or more objects to horizontal at any time.

You can turn vertical text on or off in text boxes and shapes at any time.

1. Go to the Pages app on your Mac.

2. Open a document with a text box or shape, then Control-click the object you want the vertical text in.

3. Choose Turn On Vertical Text.

   If the object already contains text, it becomes vertical and any additional text you add is vertical. If the object didn’t already contain text, any text you add is vertical.

4. To make the text horizontal again, Control-click the object, then choose Turn Off Vertical Text.

You can fit two to four characters horizontally within vertical text. This is useful for writing a few Latin characters, such as numbers, so they can be read from left to right.

1. Go to the Pages app on your Mac.

2. Open a document, then while writing vertical text, select two to four characters you want to rotate.

3. In the Text tab of the Format  sidebar, select , then choose Rotate to Horizontal.

   When editing the horizontal characters, you can make all the characters bold, italic and so on, but you can’t edit the individual characters separately.

If you want the horizontal characters to appear vertically again, delete the characters and re-enter them.

You can change text to full-width, upright characters.

1. Go to the Pages app on your Mac.

2. Open a document with vertical text, then select the text you want to make full width, either in an object or section of body text.

3. In the Pages menu bar at the top of your screen, choose Edit > Transformations > Make Characters Full Width.

Here are a few things to keep in mind about using vertical text in your document:

• When you turn on vertical text in a word processing document, any inline tables in your document become floating objects, even if you turn off vertical text.

• When you turn on vertical text in a word processing document with facing pages on, all footnotes go to the left side of each left page, even if the reference page is on the right page.

• If you copy a text box or shape that contains vertical text and then paste it into a Pages, Numbers or Keynote document, the object appears in the other document with vertical text.

• To paste vertical text from the body of one Pages document into another and keep the vertical formatting, the other document must have Vertical Text turned on in the Document  sidebar on a Mac or in Document Setup on iPhone or iPad.

• If you paste vertical text from the body of a Pages document into Keynote or Numbers, it appears in a text box with horizontal text. If you have Chinese, Japanese or Korean formatting in your presentation or spreadsheet, you can turn vertical text on for this text box to return the text to its vertical formatting.

• If your text has smart annotations, they are removed if you change text direction.

• In Pages presenter mode on iPhone and iPad, vertical text appears horizontally and scrolls vertically.

• Pages documents with vertical body text can’t be opened in older versions of Pages that don’t support vertical text.

• Pages documents with vertical text in objects can be opened in older versions of Pages, but the text becomes horizontal.

• Pages for iCloud can open a read-only image of a document with vertical text.