How can we make Pages UI intelligible?

> How can I make the cursor in Pages visible? It seems to be a one-pixel-wide yellow line on a white background.

The cursor honors the System Settings -> Appearance -> Theme settings.

The default settings cause the cursor to show in yellow, but you can choose a different theme color and Pages will adjust accordingly. You can't change the shape/size of the cursor, but maybe the color is sufficient.

> Or, how can I make Pages have a White-on-black format?

Pages is designed to replicate the printed document... which is most often black text on a white page. If you want something different you need to tell it so.

For example, for White-on-black, use Inspector -> Section -> Background to set your page color to Black:

then change your Styles to set your text to White rather than Black

> Similarly, how can I make the formatting indicators (e.g., page break, tab, return, etc) visible?

Via the View -> Show Invisibles menu item.

> And how can I make the rulers useful?

That's too vague a question to be able to answer. What are you trying to do with the ruler that you can't seem to manage?

> Migrating from Word has so far been a nightmare...

Pages is not a Word clone.

Word has many features, knobs, buttons, polish, and idiosyncrasies built up over 40 years, primarily catering to the professional user. Pages is more refined geared more towards home/enthusiast/casual uses, although clearly there's a lot of cross-over.

Either way, switching apps is going to incur some level of relearning, and muscle memory can be a hard thing to overcome.

If your goal is to stick with the Word-style of doing things, and if Pages isn't cutting it for what you need to do, then consider alternatives such as LibreOffice which is designed to be closer to Word.

Refer to Pages User Guide for Mac - Apple Support

With Microsoft Word on Mac (e.g. Office 2024), you can choose in its Preferences > General to have a black document with white text, and when it is saved as .docx or PDF, the result is a white document with black text.

In Pages, you can set the Section background to black, but Pages will by default provide black text. So you change the text color, and when exported to Word .docx, you get a medium gray document with that changed text color. This will not make you popular when sharing documents with others that expect normal Word documents.

As Camelot has mentioned, Pages is no Word clone. Far from it. Features that you have used in Word, that are not supported in Pages will be either excluded or result in document grief after the Word document is opened and translated into Pages document format. You may have better compatibility using the Apple Silicon version of the free LibreOffice Suite, or pay a small sum for SoftMaker's Office 2026 suite. Both of these are purposely intended to be clones of MS Office and the latter does well to visually reproduce the Microsoft interface.