Some Less Good News with Pages 5

Update for the list below: Apple have for once admitted that things aren't perfect. Some of the removed functionality will come back according to a support article. 

They say that the following features will come back within 6 months:

• Customize toolbar
• Vertical ruler
• Improved alignment guides
• Improved object placement
• Import of cells with images
• Improved word counts
• Keyboard shortcuts for styles
• Manage pages and sections from the thumbnail view

The List of Removed Features

With Pages 5, there is some disappointing news for about every user. A large amount of functionality is gone. This is a rough list of some things that are gone. It was compiled by Peter Breis in the instructive Apple Discussion forum with the help of other posters. For an updated list, see IWorkTipsandTricks.

1. Select non-contiguous text
2. Outline view
3. Customizable Toolbar
4. 135 templates
5. Capture pages/sections
6. Drag reorganize pages
7. Duplicate pages
8. Delete page
9. Manage Pages
10. Subscript/superscript buttons
11. Select all instances of a Style
12. Retain zoom level of document
13. Facing pages
14. Layout Breaks
15. Layout Margins
16. Endnotes
17. Media Inspector links to iPhoto library on external drive
18. Media Inspector links to Aperture Library
19. Alignment Guides
20. Styles Drawer
21. Merge Fields
22. Drag and Drop VCards
23. Default Start Up page
24. Vertical Ruler
25. Style Function key shortcuts
26. Bookmarks and Links
27. Images within Tables
28. Mathtype/Grapher Equations/Formulae within Pages
29. Import Styles
30. Clean Import of older .pages formatting
31. User Guide
32. Search Sidebar
33. Open Type features
34. Textbox linking
35. Background Object selectable
36. Storyboards
37. Text to Tables
38. Tables to Text
39. Tables in Headers/Footers
40. Word export to iCloud
41. Export to .txt or .rtf
42. Multiple Comments view
43. T.O.C. clean numbering
44. Character Styles  ?
45. List Styles   ?
46. Selective formating in Character Styles
47. Insert File Name
48. Search in Media Browser
49. Bullet points in comments
50. Search comments
51. Two up view
52. Paste and keep style
53. Accented characters in Footer
54. Mail Merge
55. Mask with shapes other than rectangle
56. Find & Replace special characters eg paragraph returns

Some Good News with Pages 5

With Pages 5, there is some good news for people who write in Chinese or Japanese: One can finally add phonetic guides (furigana) in Pages, both in Pages for Mac OS X and in Pages for iOS.

• In Pages for Mac OS X, go to Format > Phonetic Guide Text.
• In Pages for iOS, highlight the word you want to add the text to > Click on the Right Arrow > Select Phonetics.

In both cases, you get a list of proposed phonetic guides for both Japanese and Chinese, including bopomofo: ちゅうごく, チュウゴク, zhōngguó, chuugoku, ㄓㄨㄥㄍㄨㄛˊ.

There is also some good news for writers of Hebrew and Arabic and other Right-To-Left languages, because that finally works too.

Pages 5 and Pages '09 and this blog

Pages 5 is out there with a long list of interesting new problems to solve and a few new features. I cannot promise that this blog will be updated to reflect Pages 5. It was easy to keep the blog reasonably up to date when Apple stayed away from changing the product. However, with Pages 5, much more time would be needed to handle all the new problems, and time is not anything I have much of.