Betalogue

I am still in the process of exploring the trial version of the new version of Pages in iWork ’09 but I can immediately report on two significant breakthroughs as far as I am concerned.

The big one is that Pages now supports subpixel font smoothing. This means that the characters are now rendered in Pages documents with the same font smoothing options as the one selected by the user in the “Appearance” system preference pane.

This is a pretty big one, as fas as I am concerned, because the difference in font rendering between Pages and other word processors / text editors was always jarring. After so many years, I had more or less resigned myself to the fact that we wouldn’t get proper text rendering in Pages until monitors have resolutions that are high enough to make anti-aliasing irrelevant. But it looks like Apple agrees that we shouldn’t have to wait that long.

The other fix is more minor, but quite important for people like me who design “smart” multiple page documents and want their word processor to honor the Keep With Next / Keep Together formatting options. Well, it looks like the issue with two consecutive paragraphs formatted with “Keep With Next“ is gone and that these paragraphs are now staying together at all time, either before or after the page break.

I still have to do more testing with various documents to confirm this 100%, but it’s a significant fix, because it lets me control pagination the way it should be controlled (and not with ugly manually inserted page breaks).

So cheers to the Apple engineers who fixed these two things. They are much appreciated, at least by me.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Wednesday, January 7th, 2009 at 7:59 pm and is filed under Pages. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.