How do I rotate text in Pages?

As there is no support for vertical text, the only way to rotate text in Pages is to use text boxes.

To do that, click once on the textbox, so it gets eight white diamonds to grab for resizing.

Then hold down the command key and hover the mouse over one of the diamonds. The mouse pointer turns into a bent double arrow, which you can use to rotate the text box.

To rotate in exact multiples of 45 degrees, hold down shift and command at the same time as you rotate.

If you want more precise control of the rotation, you can go to the Inspector > Metrics (the ruler symbol) and then type a value in the field for Angle.

How do I mix landscape and portrait in the same document?

In Pages 3.0 you cannot mix portrait and landscape layout within the same document.

One way of simulating mixed page orientation is to use a rotated text box on the pages where you want a different layout.

If that does not suit your needs you may want to try NeoOffice/OpenOffice. First define one Page Style for landscape and one for portrait:

1. Format > Styles and Formatting > Page Styles (icon over the list of styles).
2. Create new styles or right click on existing Page Styles to Modify their properties. Orientation is under the Page tab.
   
3. Put the cursor where you want to change page orientation.
   
4. Format > Paragraph > Text Flow. (I did not name those menus. I just copy their names. Don't blame me!)
   
5. Set Breaks > Insert. Type: Page.
6. Click on With Page Style, and select a page style with portrait or landscape mode.

Or in MS Word:

1. Format > Document. Apply to: "This point forward".
2. Click on Page Setup... and change to landscape or portrait.

How does Pages handle captions?

If you want a caption under a picture or table, you can create a text box under the picture and group the two items together. That will make sure that they stay together when text and layout objects move around.

If you have a lot of pictures with captions, you may want to create a dedicated Style to apply to the text boxes, so the layout is harmonised throughout the document.

Unfortunately there is no function to get automatically numbered captions. Neither can you have an automatically generated Table listing all images or tables.

How does Pages handle Bibliographies?

There used to be some fairly big limitations in Pages' own handling of references, citations and bibliographies. With Pages '09, Apple supports Endnote. I currently (6 January 2009) do not know how well that integration works.

The following text was written for earlier versions of Pages.

If you choose to use Endnotes that go at the end of a document, you cannot use page Footnotes or Section Endnotes in the same document. If you want to add text after the list of Endnotes, you are better off using Section Endnotes to start with. Use one section for the whole document, until the "end notes" section, and then add another section after that with the last bits of the document.

If you want to use the same reference several times using cross references with footnotes, you will have problems. Microsoft Word handles that better.

There is no support for multiple tables of contents. Neither is there an integrated Bibliography database, as there is in NeoOffice/OpenOffice.

Pages does not integrate elegantly with dedicated reference software like Thomson ResearchSoft's EndNote or Sonny Software's Bookends or Reference Miner. That kind of software tends to integrate better with Microsoft Word or Mellel. It is sometimes able to scan RTF files - which you can produce from Pages, provided the document does not contain pictues.

Thomson ResearchSoft state on their Mac page that they are unable to integrate their Cite While You Write functionality into Pages 3.0, as Apple does not support that kind of integration.

CiteInPages but it claims to integrate with BibDesk after some configuration.

Third Street Software's Sente does have bibliography support for Pages.

Why cannot a table cell span two pages?

I have no idea why Apple chose to prevent table cells from spanning two pages, but that's the way things are in Pages 3.0 and earlier.

This may not be a big problem if you are translating Petrarca's sonnets, and want the left column to contain the original text and the right one the translation. Each sonnet is so short that you probably can adjust the text so no split is needed between pages.



However, if you try the same trick with Beowulf, you will inevitably end up having to split chapters over page breaks. Not only is the end of the text simply cut off - there is an ugly trace of letters cut in half.



One solution is to use text boxes. Have one set of text boxes on the left for the original and link them over the page breaks. Have a parallel set of text boxes on the right for the translation, and split them in the same way.

The case of the disappearing Character palette

The Character palette and the Keyboard Viewer sometimes do not come up when you want to. You can try to click on its menu item in both the Edit menu and the Flag menu, and it remains hidden.

The reason is that some cache files are corrupted.

The solution is to delete the following files from /System/Library/Caches:

• com.apple.IntlDataCache.le
• com.apple.IntlDataCache.le.kbdx
• com.apple.IntlDataCache.le.sbdl
• com.apple.IntlDataCache.le.tecx

And then restart.

After that, it should be no problem accessing the Character palette from the Edit menu, in applications that support it, like Pages, or from the flag menu.

If it does not appear in the flag menu, go to System Preferences > International > Keyboards and activate it.

Update 21 January 2008: Apple today posted a very similar solution here.

OpenType, TrueType, PostScript fonts, which is best?

A new well designed OpenType or TrueType works fine with Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), and most people have no reason to ask themselves any questions - at least not if you write in a language with a Latin alphabet. Older fonts may not work in Mac OS X 10.5, even though they worked in 10.4. As PostScript fonts are being phased out for OpenType fonts, PostScript fonts often tend to fall in the unsupported category. Mac OS X supports Macintosh or OpenType Postscript, but it does not support Windows Postscript.

Here is a short summary for each font.

• PostScript fonts are nowadays almost always Postscript Type 1. There are plenty of other Types, but none of them matters. Some features (like the hinting) are not completely documented. They are defined with cubic Bézier curves which is more flexible and more complicated than TrueType's quadratic curves. The reason they exist is that Adobe created them. As Adobe now promotes OpenType instead, it is likely that pure PostScript fonts will become rare.
  
• TrueType fonts were developed by Apple and licensed by Microsoft. They use quadratic Bézier curves. The reason they exist is that Apple and Microsoft did not want to pay Adobe's high license fees.
• OpenType fonts were developed by Microsoft and Adobe. They are a thin wrapper around PostScript and TrueType fonts and share the same features. The reason they exist is that Microsoft and Adobe wanted one unified format.

Most fonts work equally well on both Mac OS X 10.5, Windows and Linux, but there are exceptions.

OpenType support is much improved in Mac OS X 10.5 compared to Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger), but it is not yet complete. Most typographic extras now work as well as they do with TrueType fonts: ligatures, old-style figures, contextual alternates and so on. Even the Japanese glyph variants work as well in OpenType as they do in TrueType.

However, some glyph variants still do not work in Pages; exact line spacing does not work; and Arabic ligatures do not work at all, even though they work in TextEdit.

How do I modify shapes in Pages?

After you have added a drawing object in Pages there are a number of modifications you can do, but they are not always obvious from the user interface. This blog goes through a couple of examples of what can be done - not using the inspector even once.

Start with a simple square.


Go to Format > Shape > Make Editable.


The square is now editable and gets four red dots in the corner, which you can drag around. From now on, if you lose the red dots, the easiest way to get them back, is to click on the square twice slowly (do not double-click). As it already is editable, you no longer have to go to the menu.

First we want to create a trapezoid. Click in the upper left corner to select it. It turns white. Shift-click in the upper right corner to add it to the selection. Drag either of the two white corners, and the whole upper line moves around.


As you move the dots around, they snap to alignments, just like other shapes in Pages. Below, the upper right corner is right above the lower left corner, as you can see from the blue line that connects the two small circles.


Now we want to make a triangle from the trapezoid, so we need to remove one of the corners. Click in the lower right corner, so only that one is selected, and press delete. The lower right corner disappears, and we are left with the other three - we have a triangle. (To go back to the trapezoid, you could either press command-z or alt-click on a border to add another red circle and then drag it to recreate the previous shape.)


To rotate the triangle, command-click on a corner and drag it. A small window shows how many degrees you rotate the image. If you hold down shift, as you rotate, the shape will only rotate to 45°, 90°, 135°, 180° and so on.



Now double click on one of the corners. It turns into a Béziers curve. You can drag the two handles to change the shape of the curve. If you want to break the two handles, you can hold down command, as you drag one of them. If you want to join them again, hold down alt when you drag.


To create an open path, go to Objects (in the toolbar) > Shapes and choose the curve shape at the bottom of the list. Click once in the document, and then a second time to create a line. (You could click several time to create more lines or click-drag to create curves, but that's not what we want to do right now.) Press esc to finalise the line.


Now alt-click on the line to create a new red circle. Double click on the new circle to make it a Bézier curve.


Drag the newly created circle and adjust the curve. Unfortunately it is difficult to get a perfect circle segment, but you can get an approximation that may be good enough for some uses. Adding more points can improve the approximation.



For a video on how to create a half-circle in an even easier way, check this video by Kyn Drake.

What is a "rare" ligature?

If you open the Typography panel from the font panel, you may notice that some fonts have both "Common Ligatures" and "Rare Ligatures". What is that supposed to mean? Is it not up to the user to chose what s/he thinks is rare or common?

There is no strict border between common and rare ligatures. The base assumption is that a common ligature is a ligature that is natural and can be applied without disturbing the text. Take the ligature fi mixing f and i. You can usually apply it whenever an f and and i meet. Most readers will hardly notice, but the text becomes more pleasing to the eye. Common ligatures are usually switched on by default. Common ligature very often start by the letter f. Some good candidates for common ligatures are ff, fl, ffi, fi, ffl, fb, fk and fh.

A "rare" ligature, however, goes out of its way to be noticed. It is usually pleasing to the eye, but at the same time it is so obvious that it disturbes the reading. They should usually not be applied to body text, but they can be applied to headers and titles. The most common "rare" ligature is probably st for s and t. But there are many others. Apple Chancery has rare ligatures for the letter combinations ot, et, sp, ss and es, just to mention a few. Big Caslon and Hoefler Text and many Adobe fonts provide rare ligatures for ct.

Overuse of rare ligatures in Apple Chancery.

The recommendation is to leave the default - common ligatures on, rare ligatures off, unless you find a really good reason to change it.

More information for ligature enthusiasts.

How do I contact Apple about Pages?

If you find a problem in Pages, you can use the following official channels:

1. Apple's Discussion forums
   
2. Apple's Pages feedback page
3. Apple's Bug reporting system

Only use the Bug reporting system if you are certain that you have found a real bug. It is good if you first ask around in the Discussion forum, to make sure that you are not alone with the problem.

When you have things you would like to see implemented to improve Pages, many say that the feedback page is the only thing that works. I disagree. I think the Discussion forum is equally efficient - or inefficient. If Apple's designers are clever, they will browse through the forums with statistical tools. They will see how many search queries have been made on different subjects, and they will draw conclusions from that.

However, it is true that there is no guarantee that Apple's developers read the discussion forums. What you write there may be completely ignored. However, there is no guarantee that Apple's developers read the feedback page either. For all we know, messages may go straight to a trash can at Apple.

To see how much attention Apple pays to the feedback pages, check for example http://www.apple.com/feedback/ipodshuffle.html . When you fill it in, there is not today (June 2008) even an option to select 2G as capacity, even though the 2G model has been available for almost a year. Clearly Apple does not care enough about the page to maintain it enough to get proper information.

If you post to the discussion forums, you will at least get feedback from other users, who can comment and ask for needed clarifications. Besides, Apple's developers would be pretty lazy if they never bothered to quickly browse through the forums every now and then to see what's up.

At the same time, it is never wrong to use the feedback page. Someone may read it. And it is very easy to do it.

The best bet is to do both - post in the discussion forums and ask for comments, and at the same time post to the feedback page.

It may be worth noting though, that even if your request makes sense to you, it may not make sense to Apple or other users. It is often more efficient to ask other users how they handle the problem situation you try to improve, than to demand Apple to implement the solution you happen to think is best.

Why does Pages print negative images?

In some cases Pages has been known to print images with inverted colours. All red colours may come out as green, for example.

There is one case in particular that has been identified:

• Printing on HP printer

and

• using Mac OS X 10.5.1 (Leopard)
  

and

• appending drop-shadows to a picture.

One way to fix the problem is to remove the shadows from the picture. Another is reportedly to print to PDF, open the PDF in Adobe Reader (not Preview!) or iPhoto, and print from there.

Hopefully Apple will correct this bug in future releases.

How do I change the shape of the Font palette?

The Font palette or Font panel, that little friendly window that comes up when you press ⌘-T, has a surprising number of possible shapes. Some you can get by simply resizing the window from the lower right corner.

Drag up left:


Drag up right:


Drag down left:


Drag down right:


And then access the wheel menu, where you can show "Preview" and "Effects":

With Preview:


With Preview and Effects buttons:


You can also mix them to some unusual but perhaps useful combinations, like Preview in a really small window.

How do I change kerning in Pages?

You cannot, and that is mostly a good thing. However, you can change tracking using the Inspector > T > Text > Spacing > Character. And that is probably what you want to do anyhow.

The following paragraphs are just there to get the terminology right. If you do not care about the terminology, you can skip the rest of this posting.

Tracking is a fairly simple thing. It is just the space between the characters.

Kerning, on the other hand, is a property that is built into the font itself. It defines how certain characters are adjusted when they stand next to each other.

The two bottom fields in the picture above show kerning and tracking in Adobe InDesign. Here the kerning is shown as -37 within brackets - the default value for kerning between W and A in this font. Nothing is changed by the writer. The tracking is 100 - also the default.

As W and A lean in the same direction, they can stand slightly closer than for exampel W and T without touching each other. -37 expresses how much closer they can be according to the font designer.

Between A and T, the default kerning is -74. The font designer decided that they could get even closer to each other.

However, between T and E, the default kerning is 0. There would be no advantage pushing them closer together, as they already are very close on the top part.

Usually the default values are good, and you would not like to change them.

However, if you really feel you need to change the kerning instead of the tracking, you can use TextEdit. To see how it works yourself, create a new document with just two lines:

WA
TER

Highlight the text and go to the menu Format > Font > Kern > Use Default. Now look carefully at the letters and go to Format > Font > Kern > Use None. You will see that WA changes, but not TER, where there is no default kerning.

The same trick does not work in Pages, where the similar menu is Format > Font > Tracking, and the options are None, Tighten and Loosen. This is just a round about way to do the same thing as in the Inspector - tracking.

Pages adjusts tracking - not kerning. And to most of us tracking is just what we need.

How do I see what my fonts look like?

From Pages '09, you can see WYSIWYG font previews in the Format Bar font menu. Just make sure that you have the preferences right: Pages > Preferences > Show font preview in Format Bar font menu. To switch between WYSIWYG and standard font names, hold down the alt-key, as you click on the menu.

In previous versions this was not possible, but there were some other options that worked fairly well - some would say better.

Use the Font palette header

Follow these steps:

1. Display the Font palette using ⌘-T or the menu Format > Fonts > Show Fonts.
2. Click on the wheel in the lower left corner and choose "Show Preview".
   

You will get a preview of the currently highlighted font.

To easily scroll between the fonts, first put your cursor in the search field. This will take the focus away from your main document. Then highlight a font and scroll up and down with the arrow keys.

Use the Font palette Favorites


Select the collection "Favorites". It lists the latest font families you used, and it shows them in the last used Typeface and Size.

Use an Apple Script

Follow these steps:

1. In the Finder, go to Applications and open Font Book.
2. In Font Book, highlight all fonts (or the ones you are curious about).
3. In the Finder, go to Applications > AppleScript > Example Scripts > Font Book and double click on Create Font Sample.scpt. It will open in Script Editor.
4. In Script Editor click on "Run".
5. Wait.

After some time, you will have a document in TextEdit that contains samples of all your Typefaces in all your fonts. Save it for future reference.

Use Font Book

Font Book is an important tool for at least two purposes. One - display what your fonts look like. Two - organise your fonts.

The main reason Apple has not included WYSIWYG font displays in Pages or the Font Palette is that it would be next to impossible with all the fonts we have today. You would have to scroll for ever - up and down, looking for a font that fits your needs. You would forget the name of one you saw and you would have to start over again.

WYSIWYG font menus worked on the first Macs, when the average user had no more than six fonts, but today the average user has several hundreds.

If you are serious about finding the most perfect font in this hay stack, use Font Book collections. It does not cost anything, and they are easy to remove, when no longer needed.

Create a collection for for example sans serif fonts, another for good body text fonts, another for Chinese fonts, and so on. It will be much easier to compare Monaco and Andale Mono, if they are in the same small collection, than if you have to scroll 150 fonts to get from one to the other. For more hints how to create collections, check this post.

Which of Pages' methods to create PDF files should I use?

If you prioritize a small file, use Share > Export > PDF (Good) or PDF (Better). "Good" means roughly 72 dpi for the embedded images. "Better" means roughly 150 dpi. Images will lose quality, but it should be acceptable for display on a computer screen.

If you prioritize high quality graphics, use Print > PDF > Save to PDF or Share > Export > PDF (Best). These two methods seem virtually identical. Graphics included in the document keep the original quality and resolution.

There is no difference between any of the methods for text and inserted shapes. They are vector graphics and keep their infinite resolution.

If you will send the PDF off for professional printing you can try one of two options.

• Print to PDF/X. This is supposed to produce a file with colour profiles that a printer can handle correctly. See further information.
• Print to PostScript and then convert the postscript file to PDF - preferably using Adobe Acrobat. In some (or all?) cases this produces a file that is easier to colour separate. See further information.

(Note: The "Share" menu mentioned above was called "File" before Pages '09.)

For information about some of the features that Pages supports in PDF files, see this post.


On the left a 300% view of a picture scaled to fit one square inch in Pages. In the middle, the same Pages file exported as "Good" PDF. The loss of quality is clearly visible at 300% magnification. To the right is the result of a "Preflight" in Adobe Acrobat. The image dimensions are 73/73 pixels.

EGWORD (removed article)

The comparison with Egword is removed, as Egword no longer exists as an application. For those who are curious, the comparison is still available here.

Helvetica Narrow problems

With Mac OS X 10.5, Leopard, some users report problems with Helvetica Narrow appearing as substitute font for Helvetica. There are couple of things you can try to fix the problem.

* The obvious thing is to delete Helvetica Narrow. Also look for "N Helvetica Narrow", which may be stored in one of the font folders. Spotlight search for the fonts, to be sure to find all instances.

* Disable Helvetica Narrow. That seems to have worked for some people, but not for everyone.

* Install Helvetica a second time, but this time to your User library or /Library/Fonts. You can find the font using Spotlight. Drag it to your User library or /Library/Fonts or use Font Book. If you get a warning about a conflict, choose "Allow Conflict". (This is not a very clean solution, but it has worked for some people.)

* Disable all your User fonts - just in case.

* Remove all System 9 fonts from /Library/Fonts. You can recognise them as they appear with a size of zero.


For other font problems and suggested solutions see deleting font cache and missing fonts.

Update 29 May 2008: The updated version of Mac OS X, 10.5.3, is said to fix the Helvetica Narrow problem.

How do I import a LAB image to Pages?

CIELAB colours are mostly used to edit pictures, but in some cases one might want to include an image that uses the LAB colour space to Pages.

Pages 3.0 usually imports Photoshop PSD files, but for some reason, it fails with PSD files using LAB colour space.

The solution is to save the image as TIFF. It maintains the colour space and it displays fine in Pages.

There is one restriction however: Instant Alpha does not work on imported LAB TIFF files. The solution is to add transparency in the TIFF file itself before import.

Which are the document types used by Pages in Applescript?

The document types used by Pages under Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) are defined in the Pages package Content/Info.plist under the tags CFBundleDocumentTypes > [a number] > CFBundleTypeName. They are the following ones:

• SLDocumentTypeRichText
• SLDocumentTypeRichTextBundle (rtfd)
  
• SLDocumentTypePlainText
• SLDocumentTypeSimpleText
• SLDocumentTypeMSWord
• SLDocumentTypePDF
• SLDocumentTypeAppleWorks

Not all of them can be used in Applescript to export documents. There are the same limitations as for Export using the Share > Export dialogue. To see how they can be used, see this example.

My fonts in Leopard are crazy. How do I reset the font cache?

In the best of all possible worlds, you should never have to reset the font cache, but Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) seems to have some stability issues with fonts, which sometimes appear missing, even though you can see them in Font Book. If you have serious font problems, you can try the following. It is (probably) risk free if you follow the instructions exactly, but if you do not follow them to the letter, you may damage something in your system.

Therefore you should only follow these instructions in two cases:

• You understand them perfectly, and you know what they are doing.
• You are desperate because of some font problems.

Here are the steps:
1. Open Terminal.
2. Type the following two commands:

cd `getconf DARWIN_USER_CACHE_DIR`
open ..

3. In the Finder window that appears, drag the folders -Caches-, -Tmp- and TemporaryItems to the Trash, if they exist.
4. Restart. You may get a message that the boot cache is being rebuilt.

Once you have restarted, your font problem may be gone.

For other font problems, see missing fonts and Helvetica Narrow.

How do I change all red text to blue?

If you have applied the same colour in a lot of places in a document and want to change them all at once, you can run the following AppleScripts.

First you want to know the code of the colour you have. Put the cursor in a coloured word and run this script in Applications > AppleScript > Script Editor.

tell application "Pages"
 tell front document
  set S to selection
  tell body text
   set C to color of character before S
   display dialog (((item 1 of C) as text) & ", " & ((item 2 of C) as text) & ", " & ((item 3 of C) as text))
  end tell
 end tell
end tell

Then run the following AppleScript, after you have changed the example colours to the ones you found running the previous script:

tell application "Pages"
 repeat with achar in characters of body text of front document
  if color of achar = {53355, 23, 54} then
   set color of achar to {23, 54, 53355}
  end if
 end repeat
end tell

How do I use an image to fill text?

There is no built in way of doing it, but if you have some time it is possible using Preview:

1. Insert the fill picture to Pages.
2. Create a text box with the text you want. Use black text.
3. Copy the text box.
4. Open Preview and select File > New from Clipboard.
5. Save the image as jpeg (to get rid of the transparency of the background).
6. Copy the image from Preview.
7. Paste it into Pages.
8. Position the fill image behind the pasted picture.
9. Use Format > Instant Alpha to make the text transparent, and the image will be visible through it.

Where are the templates stored? Where are the example pictures?

The template images are well hidden in the Pages application package. Right-click on it and select Show Package Contents. Go to Resources > Templates. Each of the template is a package in itself. Right-click on each and select show Package contents, and you will be able to find the pictures. You can copy them from there, but do not remove them, or you will destroy the templates.

If you create templates yourself, they will by default be stored in your home directory: ~/Library/Application Support/iWork/Pages/Templates/My Templates.

Why were Pages documents directories and not files?

Before Pages '09, Pages files were "packages" instead of files. There were some good reasons for that, but also a lot of inconveniences.

MacOS X is full of "packages" which in fact are directories.

Almost all MacOS X applications, including iTunes, Adobe Photoshop and NeoOffice are all packages. This makes it easy for developers to add and remove components and to see what files are included and what can be changed and needs to be improved. It also makes it easy to include a lot of information, which otherwise might have been spread over many files.

The main applications of MS Office 2004 are not based on packages. MS Office contains thousands of files. iWork '08 contains only 3 visible files: Keynote, Numbers and Pages.

So much for applications. But why use packages for documents?

The same reason. It is simpler. One can easily open the package of a Pages file and see what it contains if needed. If a picture does not display correctly, one can open the package and verify that the image file is there and that it works.


The drawback is that the files are difficult to attach to mails using webmail. But it takes just a right click to zip the file, and then it becomes both small and easy to attach.

How can I set the Multilingual dictionary as default?

You create a new template, change the language of all the styles to "All", save the template, and in the Preferences, choose this template as default for new documents.

Where is the "Multilingual" spelling dictionary?

When TextEdit's spelling module talks about a "multilingual" dictionary, Pages' spelling module simply says "All". To use it, go to the Inspector > T (for Text) > More and choose "All" as language.

How do I remove words from the spelling dictionary?

If you accidentally add a word to the spelling dictionary, you can remove it by opening the spelling dialogue (Edit > Spelling > Spelling...), typing the word, and clicking on the "Forget" button.

How do I change the default font?

If you are not happy with the default font in Pages' templates, you can correct it by changing the styles in the template and saving it. Then go to Preferences and select the changed template as default for new documents.

Is there a Pages Viewer for Windows?

No.

If you only have a Pages document and a Windows PC, it is very difficult to see the Pages document as the author intended it. You have only two options:

1. Get a Mac with Pages, or call the original creator of the document and have the Pages document saved in a format that can be read on Windows. That usually means Word or PDF. If you want to edit the document on Windows, only Word or RTF formats work. RTF files with images and tables are not supported.

2. If the file was saved as a package, you can look at the files inside the Pages document directory and try to make something out of the different pictures and xml files that are there. You may at least get an idea what the document is about. If the author set the checkbox "Include preview in document", when the file was originally saved, this may work out reasonably well.

If you want to see what the Windows user will see in a Pages document you can control-click on the file in the Finder and Show Package contents.



You will see the included images and other files in their directory structure. If you clicked the checkbox "Include preview in document" when you saved the file, you will even get a PDF file with all the text and some very compressed pictures in the QuickLook folder.



Anyhow, there is currently only one application that can open Pages files, and that is Pages.

(The situation is the same for Numbers and Keynote documents. There is no available reader for Windows.)

How do I make Pages autosave my documents?

With the new Mac OS X, Lion, released in July 2011, Pages '09 automatically saves all open documents using Auto Save and Versions. The basic functionality is very easy: open the document, edit, close. That's it. To use Versions and the more advanced functionality, it is a good idea to have a look at Apple's description of the functionality.

However, the autosave functionality is not problem free. There have been reports of people who have lost some data. The data is not autosaved continuously, but at regular intervals, and if you crash your machine between those intervals, text will obviously be lost.

For older versions, there was a problem, which is described below:

Pages '09 before Mac OS X Lion could not automatically save documents, so if you had typed for 5 hours without saving and there is a power failure, you would have lost all your work.

The safest way to handle this is to press ⌘-S to save the document manually as often as possible.

For those who do not trust themselves to remember this, there are a few Applescripts to do this at Apple's discussion forums, for example here and here.

How do I use a VCS with Pages?

The following was written before Pages '09, when Pages files were "packages" and not real files. The problem is probably gone with Pages '09 or later.

The problem with using Concurrent Versions System (CVS), Subversion or another version control systems with Pages, is not only that Pages "files" in fact are directories in the disguise of packages. The problem is that Pages erases the content of the directories at each save. The VCS usually saves control data in the subdirectory (package), but it is all wiped out when you save - something that makes the whole process moot.

For Subversion, there is a script available to solve it.

SVK is also said to handle Pages' directory structure.

Apart from that, a solution is to store the files as zip files - something which of course is not very convenient.

Why does the layout change when I import a Word document?

When you import (or export) a Word document, the layouts in Pages and MS Word are not identical. Some things do not simply transfer, as described here.

However, even when all present document features are supported in both programs, the layout may differ.

Text that fits on one page in one application may not do so in the other. Still, all the metrics is the same: font, font size, line spacing, character spacing, and so on.

If you look closely on the picture above, you will see that the characters have the same height in both applications, but the space between the lines is slightly off.

My guess is that this is for the historical reasons described in this article. MacOS and Windows calculate the line height in slightly different ways. MacOS uses the variables Ascender, Descender and LineGap, while most Windows applications use usWinAscent and usWinDescent. The variables mean almost the same thing, but not quite. There is more information in this article from Adobe.

MS Word needs to be 100% compatible with the layout of Word for Windows. It is MS Word, after all. And Pages clearly needs to use the MacOS way of doing things. The result is that the lines do not have exactly the same height.

How do I type characters from foreign languages?

For some simple accents and variants of the basic Latin alphabet it is very easy. The steps below will tell you how to see which characters are easy to type with your keyboard.

1. Activate the Keyboard Viewer. (System Preferences > International > Input Menu. Check the checkbox before Keyboard Viewer.)

2. In the flag menu in the upper right corner of the screen, choose Show Keyboard Viewer .



The Keyboard Viewer shows what character will be printed when you use a specific key combination.

3. Hold down a modifier key, like "alt" (⌥).



All accents that are available using "alt" with that keyboard layout are highlighted in orange. In the picture above, I am using U.S. Extended as keyboard layout, but you may have another one.

4. Now press one of the keys that were highlighted in orange, like "e" (acute accent ´ in the picture).



You now see all characters that take an acute accent with this keyboard layout. To type for example á, you would consequently first hold down ⌥ at the same time as you type e, and then press the a-key.


Chances are the characters you want are available with your standard keyboard. Following the steps above you can tell if that is the case.

To learn more about which languages and language features are supported, go to this page.

For instructions for most languages of the world, see the excellent page Unleash Your Multilingual Mac.

Which font is that really?

You are writing a text in Pages, where one character is unusual. Let's say you have chosen Party LET as font, and you type the phrase 'In Romanian an apple is called “măr”.' Everything goes fine, until you type the Romanian word măr.



All the characters display fine in Party LET, but the ă looks very different. And yet you can see from the font Palette that it is the same font as the rest of the document. Pages knows that Party LET does not contain the character ă, and therefore uses another font, but which one?

You find the answer by pasting the text into TextEdit. If you highlight the ă in TextEdit and display the Font palette, you can tell that the font used to render the character is Lucida Grande.

Which fonts are included with iWork '09?

Unless you already have them installed, iWork '09 and iWork '08 will install the following fonts on your system:

• Academy Engraved LET
• Bank Gothic
• Blackmoor LET
• BlairMdITC TT-Medium
• Bodoni Ornaments ITC TT
• Bodoni SvtyTwo ITC TT
• Bodoni SvtyTwo OS ITC TT
• Bodoni SvtyTwo SC ITC TT
• Bordeaux Roman Bold LET
• Bradley Hand ITC TT-Bold
• Capitals
• Jazz LET
• Mona Lisa Solid ITC TT
• Palatino
• Party LET
• PortagoITC TT
• Princetown LET
• Santa Fe LET
• Savoye LET
• SchoolHouse Cursive B
• SchoolHouse Printed A
• Snell Roundhand
• Stone Sans ITC TT
• Synchro LET
• Type Embellishmnt One LET

The abbreviations here stand for:

• ITC - International Typeface Corporation
• LET - Letraset
• MD - Medium
• OS - Old Style (used for the kind of figures that sometimes go below the baseline)
• SC - Small Capitals
• SvtyTwo - 72. The Bodoni 72 fonts are designed after Giambattista Bodoni’s 72-point “Papale” font.
• TT - TrueType. Also see Apple's Developer Connection.

Note: Apple's website has lists of the fonts that come installed with Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) and Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)

Why are some glyphs missing in Pages?

Glyphs are variants of characters in a font. One example is "fi", which in some fonts may use special glyphs to look like "fi". (Increase the text size in your browser, if you cannot tell the difference.) Sometimes glyphs are used to make superscripts like ² instead of 2. Sometimes, but not always, what you achieve with a glyph could also be achieved with standard unicode characters.

In a standard MacOS X application, you access glyph variants like Ligatures and other variants from the Font Palette's Typography option.



Each font can contain a large number of glyph variants or no variants at all. You can see exactly which glyphs are available in a font using the Character Palette.



There are of course different ways of handling glyphs in different kinds of fonts. Adobe and Microsoft use mainly OpenType fonts. Apple uses mainly TrueType fonts. OpenType fonts mostly work in MacOS X, but there may be some glyphs that MacOS X does not support.




For example, if you have Adobe InDesign, you can see a section of "Ornaments" glyphs in the OpenType font Adobe Caslon Pro. The selected pointed hand in the picture above is actually a "P" - something you can tell by copying it and pasting it to another application. You can also see that the unicode for the hand is 0050, and that is upper case P.

You can also see that the GID (Glyph ID) in Adobe's InDesign is 642. However Apple's Character Palette gives it GID 523. Clearly, something strange is going on.

If you access the Typography Palette for Adobe Caslon Pro in TextEdit, you do not have any Ornaments section. However, you can still double click the glyph in the Character Palette and display it in TextEdit.

In Pages you cannot even add it by double clicking it in the Character Palette, when you are running Mac OS X 10.4.

And why? Well, because it is an unsupported feature. It may not be a very exhaustive explanation, but that all there is right now.

Does Exact Line spacing work?

The problem described below applies to Pages '08 and earlier. It is fixed in Pages '09.

Unfortunately this means that the layout of a document can change between the two versions, if you used fonts that did not work properly before.

The text below was written for Pages '08:


Sometimes.

You activate Exact Line spacing for a text in the Inspector > Text > Spacing > Line, where you choose "Exactly" instead of the default "Single".

Once you have selected it, a line is supposed to stick to the same height regardless of which font is used. Unfortunately, it does not work on all fonts in Pages 3.0 with Mac OS X 10.4.10. It is not fixed with Mac OS X 10.5 either.

In the image, the black text is Helvetica, Regular, 12. The red text uses the Zapfino font. As line spacing is set to exact, the rest of the text flows correctly with the same spacing, even though the Zapfino font is taller than the surrounding text.

The blue text is set to Adobe Caslon Pro. As the exact line spacing does not work with this font, there is a white additional space that breaks the paragraph in two parts.

It seems OpenType fonts never work with exact line spacing. Many other fonts fail as well, but many work. You just have to try it out, to see if it works for your favourite fonts.

What is new in Pages 3.0?

• Import (but not export) of Microsoft Office 2007 .docx files.
• Change Tracking.
  
• Instant Alpha (to easily add transparency to pictures).
  
• Harddisk requirement down from 750 MB to 260 MB
• >100 new functions available in table formulas.
• HTML export removed and replaced by "Send to iWeb" functionality.
  
• Fixed auto-correction so "may" does not automatically become "May".
• Automatic "Proofreading".
• Word count for part of the text.
• Possibility to remove headers and footers completely.
• Visual connection lines between linked text boxes. (Can be switched off with Format > Text Box > Hide Connection Lines.)
• Split between "Word Processing" and "Layout" templates.
• Character and paragraph background colour.
• Paragraph borders
• Text to table and table to text conversions.
• Hotkeys to styles
  

This list is not exhaustive of course. Other people will notice other things and consider other things more important than some in the list above. However, I think the list covers all major changes.

Update: Somewhat updated after the first comment below. It contains even more new things, so feel free to read it.

Pages 3.0 is here

Pages 3.0 is here. A 470 Megabyte trial version can be downloaded here.

It contains plenty of new features compared to Pages 2.0, but a lot of the problems from previous releases remain. This FAQ is updated for Pages 3.0.

Missing Fonts

Some users have had messages about missing fonts in all iWork applications - Numbers and Keynote as well as Pages. In many cases these messages seem innocent but annoying. In some cases the problem can affect the layout of the document.

In Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger), it seems the most efficient fix is the following: Delete the folder /Library/Caches/com.apple.ATS (that is the font cache) and restart.

In Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), it is more delicate to delete the font cache, but you can follow the instructions here.

However, that only works if the font cache is corrupted. Sometimes the font is really missing. Pages can be very picky about fonts, even fonts you do not visibly use in a document. It is for example possible that a Style you do not use contains a font that is missing. It may also be part of a bullet list.

From Pages 3.0 there is a built in fix, which may work for you. Just follow the warnings and instructions on the screen and replace the font with another one.

However, be aware that the replacement is stored in the document, when you save it. Let's assume that you get a Pages document from a friend. It gives you a warning that the font "Nice Font" is missing. You follow the instructions and choose to replace it with Times. The next day, your friend sends you "Nice Font" so you will be able to see the document as he intended it. However, as you accepted the replacement, you will no longer be able to tell which parts of the text should have been written with "Nice Font".

Besides, reports in Apple's discussion forum show that it does not always work.

Here is a list of possible fixes in no particular order, so you can try them in any order you want.

* Delete the folder /Library/Caches/com.apple.ATS (that is the font cache) and restart.

* Use Applications > Font Book to make sure you really have all the fonts that Pages complain about. If you do not, get them.

* Enable all fonts in Font Book. Disable a few to make FontBook refresh the font cache. If it then works in Pages, enable all fonts you need.

* If you think the missing fonts may come from MS Office you can go to Mactopia to download a test drive, which will install the fonts.

* If you think the missing fonts come from Pages, reinstall Pages.

* Log into another account on your computer. That may clean up some settings and make the problem go away.

* In Font Book, highlight the fonts Pages complains about, and go to File Validate, to make sure they are ok. Make sure there are no duplicates active.

* In the Finder, highlight the files of the fonts that Pages complains about. Drag them from the Fonts folder to the desktop and then back again to the Fonts folder.

* You can also try Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility > Repair Permissions. (To be honest, I do not think I have ever heard of this actually fixing any problem, but it is theoretically possible.)

* Some people have reported solving the problem by "cleaning" the document saving it to another format. Try for example saving your document as an earlier version of Pages and then reopen it. Warning! You may lose formatting here, so keep the original as back up.

* Restart.

* Log feedback to Apple complaining about this. With enough feedback, they may fix this for future versions of Pages.

For problems with Helvetica Narrow, see this post.

How do I change the background of a page?

You cannot change the background colour of a page in Pages 3.0 or earlier. Neither can you set a texture or picture background.

If you want to change the background for the entire page, the work around is to follow the following steps

1. Insert a rectangle that covers the entire page.
2. In the Inspector, set the rectangle's Object Placement to "Fixed on Page".
3. Uncheck "Object causes wrap".
4. Go to the menu Arrange and Send to Back for the rectangle.

If you are happy with a different background colour for just part of the page you can try the following options:

• In the Font palette (⌘-T), set the background colour of the paragraph with the document icon. It does not change the colour for the whole page, and you cannot limit it to just part of a paragraph.
• Type using text boxes. You can set the background colour and background images using the Inspector.

Which formulas does Pages support?

The best source for that information is the free iWork '09 Formulas and Functions User Guide.

How do I enter a non breaking space?

Use alt + space instead of the space.

(This is used to keep words together, even if they go over a line break. You may for example have the phrase "R & D", which you for some reason wants to stay on the same line.)

How do I decide where a word is hyphenated at line breaks?

This is a missing feature in Pages.

Many applications use a soft hyphen or discretionary hyphen (unicode 00AD). That is an invisible character in the middle of a word, which only appears when the word needs to be broken into two in a line break.

Let's for example say you want to write an article about something called "efterår". You know the word, and you know that it can be broken into efter-år, if needed. A soft hyphen would be visible only when the word is broken.

Unfortunately, if you try with the soft hyphen 00AD in Pages, you will see that it is visible even when the word does not break: "efter-år".

I generated a PDF file from Pages, and now I want to know if the images are RGB or CMYK. What do I do?

The only answer I have is expensive: get Adobe Acrobat Pro.

* Open the PDF in Adobe Acrobat Pro.
* Go to Advanced > Preflight.
* Highlight any profile, for example "List all images".
* Execute.

In the resulting window, expand the data for all image and check if it is CMYK or RGB.

Where is the future of Pages?

There was some consternation at Macworld in San Francisco January 2007, as Steve Jobs did not present any computer updates - no new Macbooks, no news about MacOS X and no new versions of iLife and iWork.

This clearly does not mean that Apple will stop producing computers and MacOS X. The new iPhone runs MacOS X after all, and Apple has a huge investment in computers and software.

It seems Steve simply thought this was not the place for that kind of announcements.

But regardless of that, it may be good to be skeptical about updates to iWork and Pages.

Apple is unlikely to ever position Pages as a business word processor. To fullfil the needs of all businesses is a daunting task, and even MS Word does not do everything on its own. Microsoft has been investing in Word for more than 20 years, and it still is not perfect.

The two main purposes of Pages are likely to be
1. to make sure there is a reasonably priced Apple branded word processor for people who want one.
2. to show off Apple's technology - like advanced typography, graphics and inclusion of media in text documents and so on.

Point 1 is solved. There is nothing more to be done there. Pages works - it creates documents and saves them. There are quirks in Pages. There are things that could be added to satisfy some users or markets, but for most users it does most of the things we want.

The application AppleWorks/ClarisWorks is arguably one of the greatest applications ever. When I started using it in the beginning of the nineties, I said to myself "it only needs so little extra development to be perfect". But Apple never added that extra development. They never added an efficient index to the database and they never made it as easy to enter dates in a spreadsheet, as it is in MS Excel. And they never added unicode support.

It looks easy to do it, but it would cost Apple a lot and it would not bring a lot of additional revenue. So they did not do it.

However, point 2 is only solved for MacOS X 10.4 - not for upcoming versions. It is likely that MacOS X 10.5 will include new graphical and typographical features, which Pages can use, if it is updated. For that reason, it is likely that there will be new versions of iWork.

But do not expect big expensive development dedicated to Pages. If it can be reused in other applications, the OS will get it. If not, it will probably not be implemented.

The text above was written before iWork '08 came out in August 2007. It is still largely valid.