PAGES

'Pages' is a word processor and page layout application developed by Apple Inc. and a part of the iWork productivity suite (which also includes Keynote and Numbers) sold by Apple for US$79 in the United States (£55 GBP in United Kingdom). Pages 1.0 was announced at the beginning of 2005 and started selling in February 2005. Pages 3 was announced on August 7 2007 and runs on Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and 10.5 Leopard only.

Contents

History

Features

Pages and Word

Version history

See also

External links

History

Pages on Mac OS X is the successor of Apple's multipurpose office suite AppleWorks. The first rumors of a new Apple word processor to replace AppleWorks circulated the Internet through Mac rumor websites in 2003, suggesting a new software package to be released by Apple called "iWorks" or "iWork". Many Mac users were expecting the new program (which rumor sites then claimed would be called "Documents") in 2004. Steve Jobs, Apple CEO finally announced iWork '05 along with iLife '05 at the beginning of 2005.
There was a program of the same name made for NeXT computers by Pages Software, Inc., including similar WYSIWYG page layout features as Pages for Mac OS X. Since Apple acquired NeXT in 1997, this has led to suggestions that these programs are based on the same codebase. However, since Pages Software's NeXTSTEP assets seem to have been acquired by a Chicago-based IT solutions company, this speculation appears to be unfounded. It is known that Pages for Mac OS X was developed by the same team that developed Keynote 2, a presentation program included in iWork.

Features

Pages includes support for multi-column layout, text paragraph styles, footnotes, and other advanced typographic capabilities. It makes strong uses of templates to get users started. AppleWorks and Microsoft Word documents can be imported, and files can also be exported to a variety of formats. Graphics can be drawn directly into documents, and updated dynamically.
Pages is well suited for basic page layout and word processing tasks. The program can create lists, columns, bullet point lists, URL links, dates and times, page breaks, and will accept data from iTunes, iMovie and iPhoto. Pages can be used to create newsletters, invoices, blank documents, essays, stationery, invitations, educational materials and other types of documents. Any documents created can be exported to RTF, HTML, Word, PDF or saved as a Pages document.

Pages and Word

Most people tend to compare Pages with Microsoft Word 2004 for Mac OS X. The following are features present in Word 2004 but absent in Pages 3.0:

★ Autosave (which can be used to recover unsaved documents in case of a crash)

★ Visual Basic macros

★ Comparison of two documents

★ Multiple document versions (Pages has one version of each document)

★ Organization Charts

★ Linked and Embedded Objects

★ US Barcode printing

★ Master documents

★ Grammar Checks for several languages

★ Vertical Script and Japanese furigana

★ WordArt

★ Drop Caps

★ Intelligent caps formatting (like Title Case).

★ Native "Save" of RTF and Word format (Pages "exports" to RTF and Word format, but subsequent changes have to be exported again through a number of dialogue steps.)

★ Split document window

★ Multiple document windows for the same file

★ ''Italics'' and 'bold' in fonts with no built in typeface for it.

★ Hidden text

★ Different page orientations within the same document

★ Save and open RTF files with pictures (Pages opens and saves RTFDs which may contain images, but does not handle pictures embedded in RTF.)

★ Paste Special - for pasting a chart as an image


Pages has the following features that Microsoft Word 2004 lacks:

★ Open Word 2007 files (Word 2004 requires that Word 2007 documents be converted to the older 2004 format, while Pages is able to natively read them)

★ Save and open Pages documents

★ Save and open RTFD files

★ Support for Mac OS X Services

★ Image Masks

★ Extracting part of an image from its background

★ Image Levels

★ Embedding PDF and EPS images without degradation through rasterizing

★ Snap images to Alignment guides

★ Text fit/wrap along a curved border

★ Copy/paste text formatting

★ Instant font size scaling

★ Customizable text shadows

★ Multi-language dictionary (Word has several language dictionaries, but for each part of the text, one has to decide which language it shall be checked against.)

★ Formatting previews (Apart from the Formatting Palette, the dialogues in Microsoft Word do not show previews of formatting changes until they are applied.)

★ Ligature control

★ Advanced typography features (glyph variants, ornaments, etc.)
Neither Pages 3.0 nor Microsoft Word 2004 for Mac OS X has fully working support for right to left scripts like Arabic, Hebrew and Persian. Neither product supports the OpenDocument format.
Other functions that exist in both products are often implemented in very different ways.

Version history

Version Number	Release Date	Changes
1.0	February 2005	Initial release.
1.0.1	March 17, 2005	Fixes isolated bugs and issues causing problems to some customers. It also allowed the deletion of template pages.
1.0.2	May 25, 2005	Addresses issues with page navigation and organization.
2.0	January 10, 2006	Released as part of iWork'06. Includes new templates, table calculations, photo masking with shapes and freestyle bezier curves.
2.0.1	April 26, 2006	Pages 2.0.1 addresses issues with charts and image adjust. It also addresses a number of other minor issues.
2.0.1v2	May 1, 2006	Pages 2.0.1 addresses issues with charts and image adjust. It also addresses a number of other minor issues.
2.0.2	September 28, 2006	Pages 2.0.2 addresses issues with Aperture compatibility.
3.0	August 7 2007	Pages 3.0 released as part of iWork '08. Introduced compatibility with Microsoft Office 2007 files. Introduced Change Tracking. Transparency tool for pictures. Pages 3.0 needs only a third (260 MB) of the harddisk space required for Pages 2.0 (760 MB) in spite of the added functionality.

See also

★ List of word processors

★ Comparison of word processors

★ Microsoft Word

★ AppleWorks

★ Desktop publishing

External links

★ PagesUser.com Blog dedicated to Pages

★ iWork Community

★ iWorkAbuser Forums and Downloads.

★ Pages FAQ Unofficial FAQ based mostly on content from Apple's support forums.