Pages first impressions

Pages I've spent less time in so far. At first glance it looks very similar
in its appearance to Keynote ‹ no great surprise, since the two programmes
share developers. It has a pleasing, uncluttered (at first) interface, and
appears to offer just about all the basic word-processing features the
average Mac mini-using new user would want. I've found a couple of minor
quirks I don't care for, though. As far as I can see, the ruler is not
displayed as standard, and I can't find a way to specify as a default that
it should be, which means that I have to select it in every new document.
Performance isn't al it could be, either. On my 'book, I find that Pages
lags quite noticeably behind my ‹ not that fast ‹ typing, and when I make
one of my regular mistakes, it takes up to a second to display the error and
allow me to delete back. Not brilliant. Other than that, though, I like
Pages so far, and would like it a lot more if it would save directly to
other formats. The magazines I write for want copy in Word format, and the
publishing company wants its advertising copy in MS-DOS .doc format (yes, I
knowŠ), and this means that a two-step process would be required ‹ work in
Pages, saving in the .pages format, and then, when the job is complete,
exporting to the required format. To its credit, Pages will export to Word,
HTML, RTF, PDF or plain text, although I've not played with these features
too much yet (I don't usually have much need to in general, and likely won't
use them much in future) and can't speak to the functionality of these
abilities.

It's worth returning to the interface. The inspector pane, adopted from
Keynote, works. I personally care for it, and find it (especially with my
17" of PowerBook to play with) a convenient way to work; I typically, in
Keynote, have two or three inspectors open at any given moment, and already
find myself doing the same in pages. The display also *seems* crisp. I'm not
going to begin to speculate on whether Apple have done something cool and
groovy in Quartz, or whether it's just the open-looking interface, but the
text just *looks* that tad sharper and more pleasing to the eye than Word's
words.

My preliminary tests indicate that Pages has full Unicode support and can handle text in just about any language you have a font for, a welcome advancement over AppleWorks. A simple example using copy/pasted multilingual text can be seen at:

http://homepage.mac.com/thgewecke/pagesunicode.pdf

One glitch, however, is in keyboard input of RTL text like Arabic and Hebrew, for which the cursor and insertion point behavior is buggy and will probably not be acceptable for most people. Since TextEdit does not have these problems, they will hopefully be easy to fix. Also the kind of full justification desired by Arabic users is not possible (only Mellel can do this at present). Copy/paste of RTL text seems to work OK: An example can be seen at

http://homepage.mac.com/thgewecke/pagesrtltest.jpg

Vertical text layout as sometimes used in Asian languages is also not an option, except by manually constructing appropriate text block objects.

Pages includes localizations for Spanish, Japanese, Italian, German, French, English, and Dutch. Compared to OS X itself, Chinese, Korean, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, and Portuguese are missing from the first version.

Pages has a facility for designating the language of text for spell checking in Inspector > More. However the list of languages is limited, and there are reports that this makes it impossible to use any other spell checkers.

Adam writes in the most recent TidBits about a new program from SmileOnMyMac, "photoprinto." This, too, is a page layout program of sorts. Obviously Pages offers much more text processing features, but will Pages do much of what photoprinto offers in terms of photo layout in terms of "captions, cropping, soft edges, and other effects"?

MacWorld, MacTeens, and PC Magazine have good overviews of Pages 1.0, in all its 1.0-ness:

http://www.macworld.com/2005/01/news/pagesfirstlook/

http://macteens.com/more.php?id=602_0_1_0_C

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1755718,00.asp

-- Derek http://www.penmachine.com

One of the problems with Pages is that it isn't supported very well by Apple. Basically the only place you can post problems is the Apple Pages discussion forum, but there doesn't seem to be anybody there from Apple, from the development squad that produced Pages, so the support (mainly from other users) is scarse, to say the least. Being a new app, users are pretty much left groping around in the dark.

Example: I have a problem with the TOC in a Pages document (no, not using any of the templates as none fit), and posted it on the Apple Pages forum. Got several replies from other users, but nobody could solve my problem, much less give any helpful advice. This is a bummer with a new app. No useful support, nowhere to call or email.

If Apple is going to launch a brand new app the least it could do is have some serious support.