Pages Templates 1.0

There are also some nice looking templates at www.oneeyedgoldfish.com

These templates aren't worth it at all--there is very little content or variety. Save your money. Too bad there aren't that many a la carte choices for iWork templates as there are for Keynote.

I've been a Mac user since 1988. Before Mac OS X my favorite production applications were AppleWorks and PageMaker. Pages has been touted as the OS X replacement for both (for AW by no less a personage than Steve Himself; for PM by numerous reviewers). Unfortunately, it is neither. I really wanted to like Pages, but so far it's a real disappointment.

Pages lacks a basic function that has been standard in reasonably capable word processor applications since ca. 1990: the ability to constrain line spacing (a.k.a. leading) to a particular value, so that varying type sizes, typefaces and scripts can be mixed in text without disrupting the line spacing in a paragraph. MacWrite II could do this, and of course AppleWorks. TextEdit can do it (awkwardly, but it's there). And of course PageMaker does it, as does any app with pretensions to page layout. But Pages cannot, which renders it useless for all but the most simple text work.

Pages also provides no way to adjust the text wrap around a picture on a page; if it's set at 6 points, it'll be 6 points on all sides, which, depending on the text size and other factors, may lead to the space above the picture being twice the space below, or vice versa. So it's useless for anything beyond the most amateurish page layout.

Given that Pages and TextEdit are both produced by Apple, it would seem to make sense that both would be based on the same text engine -- so that, for instance, a document first prepared in TextEdit could be easily transferred to Pages if the user decides he needs the more advances capabilities of the latter (e.g. page numbers on a multi-page document to be printed). However, when I opened a carefully-prepared TextEdit document in Pages, I found the letterspacing had subtly changed, so I had to go through all of it again to make it look the way I wanted (i.e. to avoid widows and orphans). Apparently the Pages development team simply doesn't talk with the TextEdit development team. Why? This would seem to be a no-brainer.

Pages seems to be neither fish nor fowl. I still wish AppleWorks had been properly updated for OS X; Pages just doesn't feel as open, friendly, and easy to use -- nor, of course, does it include the well-integrated basic draw and paint capabilities that I used constantly in AW with the word processor. (In twelve years I've used AW's spreadsheet once, its database never; I'm not looking for an MS Office alternative, I want AppleWorks.) What was so wrong with AppleWorks, that it had to be replaced with something so different, somehow both more complex and difficult to learn and use, and less capable? (Actually, I thought ClarisWorks 4 was the best iteration of Apple's suite, before AppleWorks 5 became infected with button bar bloat.)

I think AppleWorks, like OS X's Finder, is a casualty of what I call "Not-Invented-at-NeXT" Syndrome: the NeXT programmers who replaced Apple's pre-1997 staff had no experience with it, are not interested in working on it, and are convinced their NeXT software (e.g. the Column View in the Finder, which was going to be the only option in OS X until users howled) is better -- if us old fogeys would just get with the program.

And what's the program? Apple's focus now is on multimedia; plain old productivity is old-fashioned, boring and offered only as an afterthought. Pages may be a fine presentation front-end for iPhoto, with over 500MB of templates (embedded inside the program, so amateurs can't lose them) to make family newsletters of Our Yellowstone Vacation. But it's not a real word processor, much less any kind of page-layout application in the traditional sense.

JimD: In a sense, I agree, but using a mouse to click the the bold and italics icons on *any* program is slow and inefficient. You shouldn't need to click icons to underline or bold text. Select your text and hit Command-U. Bold is Command-B. This is true for most Mac text editing programs. For Windows, most text editing programs use Ctrl-U and Ctrl-B, respectively. My main complaint is that a few of the other shortcuts is non-standard with respect to other programs.

I do like Pages. Nobody is saying that it competes against Word or Indesign. It doesn't, but that does not mean the program is worthless. Those other programs are a lot more expensive and for my needs, a lot more than I need to the point that they get in my way. I use it to quickly make instructions or flyers for my products, and it's had everything I needed to fill those tasks quickly.

I use pages to write simple articles for Web sites and find it to be extremely cumbersome. I really WANT to like Pages, but what little formatting I need to make is a royal pain. Having to not only keep two palettes open, I have to click icons in each palette to keep track of word count, underline text, switch to another pane to bold type, etc...

My needs don't reach into the MS Word realm, but Apple could make my life easier with a control bar with the basic formatting options in it like Word.

As far as these templates go, they're absolutely horrible and I can't believe anyone would actually spend money on them.

Sorry, when I said converting, I didn't mean file conversions. I meant learning how to do common Word tasks in Pages.

Yeah, Colin, just open your MS Word document in Pages. It does a fairly good job of retaining the formatting.

Does anyone know of a good guide for converting from Word to Pages? I've tried Pages a couple of times and each time found myself incredibly frustrated by trying to do what would be simple tasks in Word. No doubt this is at least in part due to my unfamiliarity with Pages, so a converter's guide would be very helpful.

Pages doth rock!

The only app I use more than Mail is a word processor, and when I switched to Mac I bought office. When Pages came out I was so sick of Mac Office that I was hoping for a Word killer. The Apple Store reps told me flat out that Pages wouldn't be up to what Word can do, but I bought it anyway and didn't look back. It keeps getting better while being clean and powerful, and for the love of god it keeps ordered lists in order. Something Word could never do despite megabytes of code.

Go Pages!

Why would anyone consider pages for writing a book? It's insane. Writing a book is about text (content), not layout. There's a widespread misbelief that a book author actually needs to use MS word or Pages or whatever with layout features to write a book on it. Taken to the extreme, some people some day may suggest indesign for writing. You need a text editor that is robust. If you want some sort of visual goodness and other interesting niceties (bibliography anyone?), you have Mellel for OS X or Scrivener (handy features for authors). But honestly, notepad/textedit is all you need.

In fact, for technical books, you don't even need to have someone do the layout design, latex does it for you, and much more professionally than probably a lot of cheap "pre-press" houses.

I find that Pages is actually bad. It's actually, really really bad. Why would anyone use pages is beyond me. First, competing with Mellel it will have no chance except maybe for some futile styling, that you would do much better using indesign. Second, competing with Indesign or any other more layout driven program, will not even compete. Pages is a solution for people that have no idea of what they want and need only for dabbling and making some fancy documents once in a while. ok for an iworks suite maybe, but useless for any serious writer. It shines on one aspect though: using more memory and resources than anything ever coded, by anyone. I've tried it. I mean, apple made it, it should be good right? No. After writing (or should I say attempt to write) a 3 page document on it with graphics, I realized I was wasting my time, and my computer resources: I was running on laptop battery at an airport. Tried a couple more times again later. So I tried. But to me, it's a useless program.

Keynote, on the other hand, is decent. It's not perfect, but I use it instead of powerpoint. Why? Decent image management. Ever tried to use vector graphics in powerpoint? welcome to raster world: good luck on keeping good looking graphics and your sanity. Another very strong feature of keynote is how easy it is to align objects on the slide and among themselves. Powerpoint can't even do that easily. I've switched to keynote, it's much better for my presentations. I keep the animation crap to a minimum, just fading most of the time. But I concede that powerpoint has interesting features that keynote lacks that may be very valuable to others.

Sorry for my rant, but I cannot believe how anyone can rave about Pages. I can only hope that a person that does it has not experienced virtually any other decent program out there.