Comments on: Word 2008: Flaky behaviours in simple headers/footers

By: Help! Office 2008: App launch runs Office Setup Assistant instead - MacNN Forums

Help! Office 2008: App launch runs Office Setup Assistant instead - MacNN Forums — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 21:18:19 +0000

[...] Originally Posted by DominikHoffmann Actually, I’d like to relate my very pleasant experience with calling Microsoft’s tech support It still doesn’t stop the software from being a half-baked, steaming pile of **** that should never have been released in its current form. Full of bugs and full of UI discrepancies and inconsistencies that would embarrass a novice shareware developer: Betalogue � Microsoft I don’t see the MBU as traitors, just as developers of consistently bad ports of Office. They have yet to produce a single decent version (in terms of stability, compatibility and proper integration with the OS it runs upon - the mediocrity of the actual features is not their fault after all). [...]

By: Evan Gross

Evan Gross — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 03:36:41 +0000

Pages doesn’t use WebKit - it has its own (proprietary) text editing/layout framework. WebKit simply doesn’t have the typography features needed by a “real” word processor.

By: AlanY

AlanY — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 03:33:05 +0000

I strongly doubt webkit is used in Pages. Pages inherits too many of the Cocoa text behaviors. The link Warren posted above is just the developer speculating.

By: Warren Beck

Warren Beck — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 23:08:03 +0000

Re: the use of webkit by Pages (and presumably Keynote)…

My limited understanding of this comes from a forum post by a Nisus developer in a discussion of the slowdown of Cocoa text apps under Leopard.

I think that Apple uses Webkit to render text in Pages in order to obtain better performance than it would with Cocoa, as is used by Nisus and Mellel, as examples.

Word 2004 (and 2008, presumably) uses its own text engine, and this introduces a range of distinctive quirks.

I have used Pages extensively for page layout tasks, but I prefer Nisus at this point for pure word processing. The recent 1.03 release of Nisus Writer Pro, however, has excellent graphics layout capabilities, so I expect to use it increasingly in the future.

By: Pierre Igot

Pierre Igot — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 22:10:49 +0000

I am not sure what Pages’ underpinnings are exactly. But they are certainly not a plain vanilla WebKit thing. See this post for an example of a bug that affects both Mail and Safari, for example, but not Pages.

We each have our own needs, obviously. I find that Pages can deal with the Word files with embedded graphics that I get to a reasonable extent. I still have to open the final document back in Word to make sure everything is OK, but I suspect I would have to do this with any Word alternative.

I don’t have to deal with equations, so this does not really apply to me. As for bibliographic references, I mostly deal with them within the context of InDesign, which I have to use for advanced page layout anyway.

In other words, support for add-on features is not essential to me and to most of people I work for/with. But I can easily imagine that it is essential to others.

Pages has a number of frustrating quirks and bugs, but I like its reliability and dependability and its smooth performance—except with tables. There are noticeable lags when editing large tables. I hope this will be addressed at some point.

Microsoft is incapable of developing a proper Mac OS X application. I will take a look at Nisus again one of these days, but I am quite pleased with Pages.

By: Warren Beck

Warren Beck — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 21:40:21 +0000

Here’s a vote for using Nisus Writer (Regular or Pro) as the default rtf application. It has the significant advantage over Pages in being able to read and write Word documents (as RTFs) that have imbedded and placed graphics. I am using it now entirely in lieu of Word 2004.

A significant point is that Nisus Writer Pro can now properly place Mathtype equations with the proper baseline, and it works nicely with Endnote using the Scan RTF… feature for the processing of bibliographic citations. Pages ‘08 does not work properly with Mathtype equations, and the exported RTFs do not handle graphics properly, so it cannot be used with Endnote as things now stand.

I really like Pages, but the developers at Apple have not been at all cooperative with external developers who would provide add-on features. Further, its use of Webkit for its typography is an interesting point; why would Apple not use its own Cocoa-based typography system? In contrast, Nisus seems to be making rapid progress towards a true replacement for Word on the Mac OS X platform using all of the advanced Cocoa features.