When Apple declare Pages at Macworld Expo in January , several enquiry may have passed through your mind : Is it a Word killer ? An AppleWorks replacement ? MacWrite reincarnated ? A PageMaker wannabe ? The reply to all these questions is yesandno . Pages is an program program that behaves like a word processor — but one with powerful nontextual matter and media - handling capabilities . People who do a lot of word processing will belike come off from Pages feeling as if they ’d strike gold , but layout - design mavens will find that the program leaves something to be desired .
Word Processing Prowess
As a word processor , Pages is agile and a staring pleasure to employ , and it has much better word processing capabilities than AppleWorks . Just open a new blank document and get typing : Pages conduct like any other word central processor on the grocery store , but it has text - handling features usually found in much more expensive programs .
Like Keynote , Pages bring home the bacon a handy Inspector palette from which you may manipulate your text edition , formatting paragraphs , adjust kerning , create columns , and grapple page setup . Unfortunately , alternatively of leave tools on the Inspector palette for change the font , font color , and style , Apple uses OS X ’s clunky Font panel .
page handles Word documents seamlessly , retaining styles and formatting . Once you ’ve made change in Pages , you may export a Word document that retains your formatting and style changes and that looks on the button as it did in Pages . The only time we have any problems exporting Word documents was when graphics were let in — an area in which Word has never been very agile .
Page Layout for the People
When it make out to creating beautiful document , Pages has no equal for a comparable price . tangle a artwork file from the Finder onto the page , and you could wangle it in amazing ways : add drop shadows , give the graphic edge , wrap text perfectly around the image , or rotate the ikon on the page . In gist , if you’re able to guess of a way to make your document search better using graphics , Pages will make it look even better than you imagine .
For multitude unwilling to endure the earth of pageboy layout on their own , Pages provides a expectant set of attractively designed templet with multiple layout per template . It uses text and look-alike placeholder , which are , basically , playing field on the page where you’re able to put down computer graphic or type text . Your text and graphics then take on the format , dash , and size constraint of that playing field . For the creatively challenge , these guide make beautiful documents as easy as drag - and - drop or copy - and - paste .
pageboy has a Media internet browser that lets you navigate to your iPhoto or iTunes depository library , or to your Movies folder . It does seem rather odd to be add together movies and audio to document that are almost certainly destined for print . ( you’re able to export to HTML , but the ensue entanglement varlet look horrific . ) Also , there ’s no direction to configure the web browser to find other image you may have elsewhere , and it miss access to AppleWorks ’ stellar online time - artistry library .
An Early-Release Program
page ’ weakness — and there are many — are mostly due to its immaturity . Even though the plan seem to be designed for Thomas Nelson Page layout , there is no way to delete , rearrange , or manage pages within a document . The only elbow room to bump off an case-by-case page is to delete all the text and images that look on it .
Documents printed as PDF files bet beautiful in Apple ’s Preview program , but graphics lose their drop curtain shadow when viewed in Adobe Reader ( a germ that ’s also in Keynote ) , so you may bury about taking your PDF files to the print workshop for net yield . The programme also lacks mail service - merge capabilities , so you ’ll still need to rely on AppleWorks , FileMaker , or Microsoft Word for mail merges .
Other quirks include the unfitness to drag images from one Pages written document to another , a lack of support for EPS files ( even though the manual claims that EPS is supported ) , and the inability to well import Microsoft Word styles . While none of these problems are deal breaker , they ’ll need to be remedied in the next version of Pages if the app is to become truly splendid .
