I’ve just begun to try out Pages v.1, which I’ve had lying around for a while. I had a 9-page letter composed in TextEdit which I wanted to print with page numbers, so I copied and pasted the text into Pages. Somehow I just assumed Pages would be a more full-featured version of TextEdit, which I use constantly and which I’ve found has some pretty sophisticated capabilities.

First I noticed that Pages somehow flows text differently than TextEdit; many paragraphs came out a line longer than in TE. Why? Pages’ default letterspacing seems to be subtly different than TE’s, but not entirely consistently so; in some cases I had to adjust a line’s character spacing to -1% to get it to look the same as in TE, but in other cases this wasn’t necessary. Confusing, and annoying.

Then I noticed that selecting phrases is more difficult in Pages than in TE: In TE, if you double-click a word, then move forward a few words and shift-click anywhere on another word, the entire phrase is cleanly selected. Pages doesn’t have this very convenient capability; as in AppleWorks, you have to precisely (and tediously) click right at the end of the second word, or use shift-right-arrow to get the last few letters.

And indeed, as noted in this discussion, it seems exact leading (which Pages calls line spacing) cannot be specified. It can in TextEdit, where I’ve learned how to do it especially in cases where non-Latin scripts like Chinese, Devanagari and Tibetan are mixed with Latin-script transliterations and English.

Apparently the team working on Pages doesn’t talk to the team working on TextEdit? Why not? Wouldn’t it make sense for Pages to build on TextEdit, so Apple’s two word processing apps would provide a continuum of capabilities, from basic to advanced? As it stands, TextEdit is actually superior to Pages in at least two respects I’ve discovered so far. Does this make sense?

I’ve been hoping I could move my PageMaker work — which really doesn’t require the industrial-strength capabilities (and expense) of InDesign — into Pages, so I won’t have to go back to OS 9 anymore (PageMaker doesn’t work properly in Classic). PageMaker’s one real problem for me — its total Unicode-deafness — is certainly fixed in Pages — no way, for instance, to type Hawaiian, with macrons over vowels, in PageMaker (I actually figured out how to do it using baseline shift and kerning, but it was a real kludge). But otherwise I’m afraid Pages is looking like it’s going to be a disappointment. Even in AppleWorks you can specify exact line spacing, in points.

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 were what I used constantly together with the word processor. In twelve years I’ve used AW’s spreadsheet once, and its database never. Nor does Pages look like it’ll take the place of PageMaker for me; it’s just not typographically sophisticated enough, nor does it feel like a graphics application.

Dan: Understood :).

Pierre: I agree that it would be nice for Pages to have its own method to insert things like this; my comment was intended as a workaround, not a defense of the missing feature.

The thing about exact leading comes up especially in scientific documents, where one
often has to switch back and forth to a symbol font. If the symbol font has a larger x height than the text font you are using (for instance compare Times New Roman and Symbol or Math Pi), then Pages expands the interline spacing just to accomodate, say,
one symbol character. This makes the paragraph look strange; all of the lines should have the same leading. Word has an “Exact” leading setting that permits use of symbol font without this happening; the “at least” setting of Word behaves the way Pages does. I complained about this behavior of Pages immediately after version 1.0 shipped, and I know that they got similar comments from others (see the Apple support forum on Pages, for instance). I think that this hasn’t been fixed in Pages 2 because the Cocoa library that Pages used to set paragraphs doesn’t permit it; Stone Design’s Create page layout and drawing program, for instance, cannot enforce exact leading.

I know, one can use InDesign for layouts with precision, but one would think that standard paragraph leading settings, with “standard” defined by Word, would be a priority for Pages.

I must admit exact leading is not such a big issue for me—if I really want very accurate text compositions, I use InDesign.

Who knows what Apple really has in mind with Pages/iWork. But the latest version is certainly disappointing with respect to word-processing capabilities.

dan: Right, but Apple is guilty of not providing an easier way to input a non-breaking hyphen here. The Character Palette is one big monster…

I am amazed, however, that exact leading is still not provided. Further, the line-breaking routine is still hard to use in technical documents; there is no way (as far as I know) to input a non-breaking hyphen.

I think that you are probably right about how the text engine is holding Pages back; some unorthodox choices were made in the Cocoa text-rendering library, and there is evidence that it has not improved.

Until the Pages (and Keynote) team publishes the XML schema and encourages third-party add-ons, Pages will still be more or less restricted to casual use. Perhaps this is the cost of getting the MacBU at Microsoft to support Office on the Mac for five more years.

Office is still the deal breaker for the whole platform; I recently observed a pair of older customers at CompUSA here in East Lansing asking the salesman if Office ran on the iMac G5 they were considering, and the statement was made that it was a deal breaker if it didn’t.

One would think that a platform like Mac OS X would have after five or six years a really professional word processor (like Word Perfect or something like that) as an alternative to MS Word. It is sobering to think that the whole platform depends on the availability of MS Office.