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.