Pages

I'm delighted to report that Pages, one of the iWork applications, has greatly exceeded my expectations. Granted, they weren't very high. I bought iWork for Keynote, which I've found less useful than I'd expected. I'll keep trying to find a Keynote sweet spot.

I'd tried out Pages a couple months back and couldn't quite figure it out. It seemed like it would make a good substitute for PageMaker, which my wife has been using for years to create newsletters for various schools, but I couldn't think of anything I might be able to do with it. All of the templates just seemed so complicated.

Yesterday, I was struggling along working on a design document in Word (having finally given up on MORE where I've been doing design docs for more than a decade) and I decided to see if I could do what I wanted in Pages. After flailing around for about three hours, I had the basic structure for a document that seemed to look like I wanted. The secret (as if) was to ignore all the built in style sheets and start from scratch, building what I needed from the ground up. Outside of missing the ability to fold away all the other text to focus on a particular section, Pages has a very straight forward and easy to use style mechanism, pays a minimum of attention to style information on pasted text (and that's easily overridden) and seems to be quite responsive. It also deals quite well with modern (Mac) graphics information in a way Word never will.

I fought a bit with the page number stuff (I'm not sure if it really has a problem living in a table or if I removed the problem simply by moving to different page footer layout) and it worked eventually. The only real issue I'm having right now is that my PDF exports don't have working hyperlinks (not sure how to fix that one).

Sarah is going to take this year off from the newsletter grind and I think I'll continue to work on trying to get her to move to Pages (and MacOS X).