Pages FAQ

Can Pages create epub files?

2010-08-27T05:40:00.000-07:00

Yes! From version 9.0.4 released in August 2010.

With the advent of iBook and the iPad, the epub file format is getting more useful, and luckily Apple released the functionality. This is one of the few major points where Pages is distinctly superior to MS Word.

Instructions, recommendation (and limitations) can be found at Apple's support site.

How do I batch transfer Pages documents from my iPad?

2010-06-25T13:23:00.000-07:00

You do not. No one seems to have any good solution, if you have created dozens of Pages documents on your iPad, which you then want to transfer to your computer.

To transfer one document, mail is probably the easiest solution.

To avoid transferring more than one document, my recommendation is to have only one document. Create one Pages document, add text to it. When you want to write about something else, just tap Return a few times, change style to a new heading or title, and continue typing as if nothing had happened.

(I have not found any way to add a page break in Pages for iPad. If anyone finds out how to do it, feel free to add a comment.)

Once you are ready, transfer that single document and then split it up on you computer according to the logical sections.

Warning! As long documents have a tendency to crash some word processors, make sure you make frequent local backups on the iPad using My Documents > Plus symbol > Duplicate Document.

Pages for iPad cannot create usable PDF files

2010-04-27T11:04:00.000-07:00

Some PDF files from Pages for iPad are distorted or unreadable when opened in Adobe Reader. They display much better in Preview, but as Windows users do not have Preview, this is not much of consolation. You can follow this thread to see other people having the same problem. If Apple releases a fix, the thread is likely to be updated by happy users.

There seem to be some dependency on which fonts are used. Trying out most of the fonts installed on my iPad, hardly anyone displayed correctly in Adobe Reader. However, all except Heiti and Zapfino were readable. Heiti and Zapfino displayed as dots: ••••

One font actually displayed as it should, and that was Apple Gothic. It is a mystery why that one of all fonts worked.

Most other fonts displayed as Adobe Sans MM. To get a consistent layout, you can try using Arial or Helvetica in Pages for iPad, as they also are sans serif fonts. You can also try Apple Gothic.

It is nevertheless good to validate the file in Adobe Reader. The final display may depend on your system or the layout of the document.

A list of embedded fonts in Adobe Reader. File > Properties > Fonts.

Pages stuck on iPad

2010-04-27T10:57:00.000-07:00

If you start Pages on an iPad, you may get stuck without any controls and no obvious way out.

If you are in landscape mode, the simple trick is to rotate the iPad 90 degrees to portrait mode, and the controls will appear.

For other issues see: Apple's support,

A tempting alternative - Lotus Symphony for Mac OS X?

2009-12-13T01:46:00.000-08:00

I just realised that there was another office suit out there apart from the "obvious" ones, iWork, MS Office and OpenOffice/NeoOffice.

IBM has their own version of OpenOffice, called Lotus Symphony. It is free, as in "it costs no money", but unfortunately it costs time and pain.

I gave it just a few minutes, and found a rather nice looking UI and loads of bugs.

Just finding the installation file on their web site took for ever, and once it had downloaded the 212 Megabyte installation file, it managed to lock up Firefox, so I had to kill the browser.

The installation procedure suggests you associate open document files to Lotus Symphony. I did not do that, and Symphony decided not to tell the OS that it can open the files it creates (open document .odt for word processing). In other words, when I double click a file created by Symphony, it will open in OpenOffice or TextEdit. Not even right-click and "Open with..." works. You have to open the file from inside Symphony itself.

Symphony pretends to support Asiatic languages, but there are so many problems with both input and vertical script, that I would really advice against it.

Symphony actually has a decent amount of Clipart and a "Fontwork" module which is similar to MS Office's Wordart, even though Symphony's version is less flexible.

One reason to at least download Lotus Symphony, is if you want to grab some of the Clipart. You can probably find as good clipart elsewhere on the net, but here is to extract it from an installed version of Lotus Symphony, if that is what you want:

Open Applications > Utilities > Terminal.
Type: /Applications/Symphony.app/Contents/MacOS/shared/eclipse/plugins/com.ibm.productivity.tools.gallery.common (Do not press enter!)
Press the tab key. This will expand the directory to its full name.
Type open . (Yes. With the space and the dot.)
Press enter. You will get a new Finder window, where you can browse for the clipart. The files are in wmf format, which can be opened by a number of applications, like OpenOffice, Adobe Illustrator, gimp, WMF Viewer for Mac, GraphicConverter and so on, but unfortunately not by Pages or Preview directly.

IBM Lotus Symphony 1.3 definitely has some potential, but they have a long, long way to go with bug fixes, before it can be considered a serious alternative to MS Office or OpenOffice.

If you are hesitating between iWork and MS Office or OpenOffice/NeoOffice, there is currently hardly any good reason to include Lotus Symphony as a fourth option.

How do I save as Word document?

2009-09-01T10:50:00.000-07:00

Pages is not a Word replacement. If you want a product that saves Word documents, you are better off with MS Word (which costs more) or NeoOffice/OpenOffice (which cost nothing).

Pages can export to Word's doc format, but it can be annoying to always have to select and overwrite the document you already have with a new version every time you change. Besides the export is far from perfect.

If you are set on using Pages, and nothing but Pages to edit your Word documents there is a hack, which is described at leefindlow.com. That site describes very well how to do it, so I will just add a short summary here for the record.

Please, remember that Apple never intended us to do this, and anything you do slightly wrong may mess up Pages for you. Only follow the following steps if you know exactly what you are doing.

Right-click (or ctrl-click) on the application icon for Pages and select "Show Package Contents" from the pop-up menu.
Find the file Contents/info.plist. (You may want to make a backup copy of it, in case you mess up in the following steps.)
Open the file in an editor like Property List Editor. If you are comfortable with XML, you can also use a text editor like TextEdit or TextWrangler.
Look in CFBundleDocumentTypes/Document types. There you will find a list of different Document types (CFBundleTypeName).
Find the document type Microsoft Word document.
Check its associated Role (CFBundleTypeRole). By default it is set to Viewer.
Change the Role to Editor.
Find the document type Microsoft Word 97 - 2004 document.
Check its associated Role (CFBundleTypeRole). By default it is set to Viewer.
Change the Role to Editor.
Save the file info.plist.

From now on, when you open a Word document in Pages 3 or 4, it will be able to save the file when you simply press cmd-S.

How do I make an organisation chart or a flow chart in Pages?

2009-04-25T00:52:00.000-07:00

One of the crucial things in making a chart is to have connector points between boxes and other objects, so the links can stay the same, even if you move the objects around.

The connector points of Pages are a little limited, but they exist.

Create two or more shapes. (For example: Insert > Shape > Rectangle.)
Make sure the shapes are floating in the Inspector > Wrap (third icon) > Floating (doesn't move with the text.
Highlight two shapes.
Go to Insert > Connection Line.

You can now move the objects around in Pages to fit the page layout. You can also drag the middle of the connector line to bend it. Or change line type, shadow, colour, and so on.

(Updated for Pages 9.0. Thanks for the comments pointing out that one no longer has to create the chart in Keynote!)

How do I find paragraph marks and tabs in Pages?

2009-04-14T11:01:00.000-07:00

If you want to search for paragraph marks, tabs or other special characters in Pages, you can do that in the search dialogue (Edit > Find > Find...) using the Insert... drop down.

If you prefer to use Applescript to find this kind of items, you can use the special keywords space, tab, return, linefeed and quote, for example like this:


tell application "Pages"
 repeat with achar in characters of body text of front document
  if contents of achar = return then
   display dialog (character offset of achar as integer)
  end if
 end repeat
end tell

Keyboard Shortcuts in Pages

2009-04-13T12:13:00.000-07:00

To quickly learn some of the keyboard shortcuts in Pages, the easiest way is to look in the menus. In the menu above, you can for example see that you use command+C to copy.

These are the symbols that are used:

⌘ is the "command" key.
⌥ is the key called "alt" or "option" depending on your keyboard.
⇧ is the shift key.
^ is the ctrl key.

However there are more keyboard shortcuts that are not necessarily available in any of the menus. Also note that they may be slightly different (or even broken) in other languages than English. Here are some examples of working shortcuts for an English keyboard:

Hold the mouse pointer over a word, and press ⌘ ^ D. This will call up a small dictionary window. If you want more information about the word, click on "more".

Type a few letters, and press ⌥ esc to get a list of words beginning with those letters. You can also use F5 for the same function.

To change to the next open Pages window, press ⌘ `.

To change to the next open application, press ⌘ tab.

To copy text or a graphic, highlight it. Then hold down ⌥ at the same time as you drag it to the place where you want to copy it.

You may have noticed that you can drag tabs around in the ruler with your mouse. However, by default they only land at certain positions. To be able to move the tabs around to any position on the ruler, hold down ⌘ at the same time as you drag.

When you try to close a modified document window, you get a dialogue asking if you want to change your changes. The three buttons each have their hidden shortcut: Return saves. Escape closes the dialogue without closing the window. ⌘ D is equivalent to "Don't save" and discards your modifications.

To get super script, like in mc², highlight a character, and press ⇧ ^ ⌘ +. (In the menu, it looks like the shortcut is simply ^⌘+. However, as the + character needs ⇧ to display, you need to add ⇧ as well. To get subscripts , like O₂, you only need to press ^⌘-).

To add an indent level to an item in a list, use ⌘ ]. To remove an indent level for a list item, use ⌘ [.

To add an indent level to an item in an outline, use tab. To remove an indent level for an outline, use ⇧ tab.

Graphics

If you change the size of a shape, you can hold down ⇧ at the same time as you drag its corners to keep the proportions between height and width.

If you want to rotate a shape or image, you can hold down ⌘ and hold the cursor over a resize point of the shape or image, to change the cursor to a rotation tool.

If you want to make sure that a shape or image keeps the same centre point, hold down ⌥ at the same time as you resize.

Some more graphics keyboard combinations are described in this post.

More resources

In Finder, go to Help, and type "shortcut" in the search field, to get generic Mac OS X shortcuts.

In Pages, go to Help, and type "shortcut" in the searchfield, to get Pages shortcuts.

You can find more information about shortcuts in Mac OS X at Apple's support site.

You can find more information about shortcuts in Pages at Apple's support site.

To learn how to customize your own shortcuts in Mac OS X and Pages, go to this page.

How do I unlearn words from the spelling dictionary?

2009-02-04T13:17:00.000-08:00

Let's say that you write a text about someone with the incredibly attractive name "Magnus". The name is underlined in Pages as incorrectly spelt, if you type in English. To add the name to your spelling dictionary, you may simply right-click (ctrl-click) on it and select "Learn Spelling" from the menu, and Pages will from now on accept the spelling.

Now, assume that by mistake the word you right-clicked was "Nagnus". To tell Pages that you made a mistake that should be forgotten, you right-click the word and this time select "Unlearn Spelling" from the menu.

This technique applies to TextEdit as well.

In older versions of Apple's software, you could unlearn words from the Spelling dialogue box, but with current versions, the way to go is right-clicking.

PDF/X Problems in Leopard

2009-01-31T23:36:00.000-08:00

With Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) some people got problems printing PDF/X files. It seems the people who did not get problems did not print complicated documents.

Problem one - some documents. Certain documents, like the Pages '09 template Word Processing > Reports > Visual Report simply refuses to create any document. You can choose the menu item in the Print dialogue, you can enter a file name, but then you get a message: "Alert Couldn't create PDF/X-3 document."

Problem two - resolution. This limitation was likely here even before Leopard, but it is worth mentioning. PDF/X-3 does not support layers, and that means that the PDF/X-creator has to rasterise vector graphics over pictures, like text over shadows. The problem is that Mac OS X rasterizes to 72 dpi, and that is no way good enough for printing on most modern high resolution printers.

The resolution is defined in a Filter in ColorSync (Applications > Utilities > ColorSync Utility). Go to Filters and check the properties for "Create Generic PDFX-3 Document". The resolution is defined next to the "Flatten Transparency" checkbox. The annoying thing is that the Filter is read only, so we cannot change the resolution.

What we can do, is to create a copy of the original Filter and change the value there. (Do not try to change the values for Trimbox or Bleedbox. I do not know anyone who has made them work.)

Next, is something you should NOT do. The entry in the Print dialogue to print to PDF-X is defined in /Library/PDF Services. Do not be tempted to change any of those entries. You will get a warning message saying: The behavior of this workflow may have changed because of the reasons listed below. The workflow was saved with an older version of the action "Apply Qua... If you try to resave it, you may break it and stand with one less working entry in the Print dialogue.

Instead, to solve the resolution problem, follow the following steps.

Setup

Open ColorSync.
Go to Filters.
Click on the circled triangle next to the filter Create Generic PDFX-3 Document and select the option "Duplicate".
Double click on the name of the new filter and change the name, if you want to.
Expand the filter elements and change the resolution to 300 and 300. You do not need to save the changes, but you may want to quit ColorSync and reopen it, to make sure that the change has been taken into account.

Usage

Open the document you want to make into PDF/X.
Print to PDF (standard PDF).
Right click or control click on the created PDF file and select Open With > ColorSync Utility from the pop up menu.
In the document window in ColorSync select the filter you created above from the list in the bottom left corner of the window.
Click on Apply. (The Filter list will be reset to "None" through some quirk, but do not let that scare you.)
Select Save or Save As... from the File menu. You will now have a high resolution PDF/X file. Probably.

Warning: The error handling in ColorSync is abysmal. If you have too complicated a file - for example one that would not even allow you create a low resolution PDF/X file from the Print dialogue, then the resulting file may not be compliant with PDF/X even after the ColorSync treatment. The only way I know of verifying this for sure, is to open the file in Adobe Acrobat and do a "preflight".

iWork '09 and Security

2009-01-23T12:04:00.000-08:00

The new version of iWork has a few issues with security that previous versions did not have. Note that I have no personal experience of any of the issues below, but I rely entirely on other sources. Please, use your own judgement when you use the information.

A Trojan called iServices.a has spread with an unofficial version of iWork that can be downloaded from other places than Apple.com. According to Intego, 20000 people have already downloaded the Trojan, but that sounds exaggerated. Once the Trojan is installed, it listens for instructions from a remote server. The remote server could for example ask for your personal address book or other private data, which would be sent without your knowledge.

To see if you have the Trojan, go to /System/Library/StartupItems. If there is a folder there called iWorkServices, the Mac is infected.

To remove the Trojan automatically, download this script at MacUpdate.

To remove the Trojan manually:

Open the Terminal (Applications > Utilities > Terminal).
Type sudo su and enter.
Type your account password and enter. (This assumes you are administrator.)
Type rm -r /System/Library/StartupItems/iWorkServices and enter.
Type rm /private/tmp/.iWorkServices and enter.
Type rm /usr/bin/iWorkServices and enter.
Type rm -r /Library/Receipts/iWorkServices.pkg and enter.
Type killall -9 iWorkServices and enter.

More information about the Trojan can be found here.

The next security issue is ad.doubleclick.net. Several posters in Apples forum confirm that the iWork applications send information to the advertising company doubleclick.net when the application is launched. It seems like lists of software installed at the computer and the computer model is sent to doubleclick.net without the user's knowledge. Apple has so far not made any comments on this, so we do not know if the information is limited to that, or if other information may be sent under some circumstances.

A serial number is only needed if you buy the downloadable version. If you buy the DVD, you just install it and that is that. This makes it easier to copy the application between machines, and it is likely to increase both the piracy and the usage of the product. There is also a way to hack the trial version to work as a full version, but this is not the right forum to give instructions how to do that.

Finally, iWork '09 includes the possibility to save documents so they cannot be opened without a password. However, Apple has not said anything about what level of encryption is used. The encryption may be very good, but it may also be ridiculously easy to break for anyone with the right tools. We users do not know. For now, I would not recommend anyone to use iWork's password functionality except for harmless documents. Do not use it for bank details, credit card information or commercial confidential information, for example.

All this should remind us that iWork is not just a harmless tool on our harddisks. If one is not careful, one can get into some really delicate situations.

Why did the layout of my old Pages document change?

2009-01-10T05:06:00.000-08:00

If you open documents created with Pages '08 in Pages '09, it is possible that the layout does not look the same any more.

One possible error source is a bug in Pages '08, which made some fonts look bigger than they should. There is no known easy way to get the old layout back, but to manually readjust the fonts, playing with size, and line Spacing (set in the Inspector's T pane).

A description of the previous problem can be found here.

How do I change a single file Pages document to a package?

2009-01-09T11:45:00.000-08:00

If you for some reason want to change a Pages '09 single file document to a package type document, you can follow these steps.

Unzip the single file.
Put the unzipped content in a new folder.
Rename the new folder to any name with the extension ".pages".

The folder turns into a file which should open fine in Pages.

How do I see what my file contains?

2009-01-09T11:24:00.000-08:00

If you want to see the elements included in your Pages '09 file, you can simply unzip it, using the command unzip in a terminal window.

To avoid any accidents with large numbers of files spread in the current directory you can follow these steps.

Create a new folder "test".
Drag your Pages file to the folder "test".
Open the Terminal (Applications > Utilities > Terminal).
Type cd in the Terminal and press the spacebar.
Drag the folder "test" to the terminal.
Hit enter. (This will change the "current directory" of the Terminal to your folder.)
Type unzip in the Terminal and press the spacebar.
Drag the Pages file to the Terminal.
Hit enter.
Open the folder "test" in the Finder

The folder "test" now contains all the images and media of your Pages file. The actual text is in a file called index.xml.gz. You can now easily see which images you have, how big they are and so on.

If you want more information about the unzip command, type man unzip in a Terminal window, and press enter. Move up or down in the man page using the arrow keys. Type q to leave the man page.

Before Pages '09, all Pages files were packages. To see the content you would simply right click on the file and choose the option "Show package content" from the pop-up menu.

Even in Pages '09, you can use packages instead of single files, if you go to the menu Pages > Preferences > Save new documents as packages.

iWork '09 released - what's new and what isn't

2009-01-06T10:53:00.000-08:00

There is a new version of iWork out there today. This is an incomplete list of new functionality in Pages '09/Pages 4.0:

Full screen view
Dynamic outlines
Mail Merge integration with Numbers
Support for MathType and EndNote
A "Share" menu to quickly mail documents to other users or to share them using "iwork.com" or iweb.
Documents are no longer packages, but "real" files, which more easily can be attached to emails.
Tables (but not images) in RTF files are now recognised.
Documents can be password protected.
Reduce File Size to remove non used data from cropped or shrunk pictures.
Insert Filename
Sub-pixel font smoothing seems solved
A more advanced gradient fill for graphics
A fix of the problem with exact line spacing.
Reflections can now be added to shapes.
You can now add paste tables from Safari.
The flag "Keep with following paragraph" now works for several paragraphs after each other.

The following new languages are added:

Traditional Chinese
Danish
Finnish
Korean
Norwegian (Bokmål)
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Swedish

Some issues that are not fixed are:

Auto-save
Japanese furigana, vertical script
Right-to-left writing in for example Arabic and Hebrew
Support for Open Document format
There is still no easy way to change default font.
There is still no easy way to change default dictionary language inside Pages.

OpenOffice 3.0 and Pages 3.0 comparison

2008-11-01T02:59:00.000-07:00

This comparison is inspired by Wikipedia's Word vs. Pages comparison, but it is about OpenOffice instead of Word, and it contains some personal observations. It does not cover all the differences, but only some I consider important or interesting. The points are not ranked but just listed in a random order.

The current price for iWork '08 (with Pages 3.0) is close to 80 euro. The price for OpenOffice is 0 euro.

In OpenOffice but not Pages

Open and save OpenDocument files
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.)
HTML editing
Document comparisons
Multiple windows with the same document (However, there is no split window, as far as I can tell.)
Multiple versions (Pages stores only one version of the document in each file)
AutoSave
Master documents
Script recording (Called “macros” in OpenOffice. The language is OpenOffice Basic by default. Applescript is not supported.)
Connector points for objects in diagrams.
Drop caps
Italics and bold in fonts with no built in typeface for it.
Hidden text
Paste Special - for pasting a chart as an image
Bibliography databases
Vertical Script and Japanese furigana
Support for right-to-left scripts, like Arabic and Hebrew
Built in formula editor

In Pages but not OpenOffice

Save and open Pages documents
Save and open RTFD files
Support for Mac OS X Services
Image Masks
Usable image controls. (OpenOffice actually has plenty of controls to edit images, but they are so stone age like, that they are virtually impossible to use.)
Multi-language dictionary (OpenOffice has several language dictionaries, but for each part of the text, one has to decide which language it shall be checked against.)
Ligatures and other advanced typographic features

Neither application seems to have anything like Microsoft Word's WordArt module.

Looking at the usefulness of the functions, it would seem like OpenOffice is much better. Most of the functionality that is unique to Pages is cosmetic or largely irrelevant to most people. Even if Pages is better at editing images, anyone who really cares about images will have to have an external dedicated image editor anyhow.

However, using the two programs there is a huge difference in perception. OpenOffice feels slower. There are a few milliseconds before the characters are displayed after each keystroke. It is more difficult to find options, and what is implemented is usually done in a strange way. There is for example a function called Conditional Text. To use it you have to start by following the menu path Insert > Fields > Other, and then click the Variables tab. As far as I can tell, none of those labels have anything to do with conditions or text.

In other words, OpenOffice is not a program to have fun with.

How do I get svg files into Pages?

2008-10-08T12:32:00.000-07:00

SVG files are "images" which can be resized without losing any information. They can be created by programs like OpenOffice (the drawing module), Inkscape or Adobe Illustrator.

Often the program that created them can also save to PDF, which Pages handles directly, and that is then an easier solution.

However, there is a way to import black and white SVG files to Pages with the help of some other programs. It it may be cumbersome, the first time you set it up, and you will have to type commands in the Terminal, but it does work.

Download the program svg2key and follow the corresponding instructions at http://mcb.berkeley.edu/labs/zusman/dave/svg2key/ .
Run the program on the SVG you want to import to Pages.
You will get a Keynote file. Open it in Keynote.
Copy the content and paste it into Pages.

(Images are usually stored inside the Pages file "package" as separate objects. However SVG objects are stored inside the index.xml file in the package, just like "shapes", text and style information. As far as I can tell, they appear within the tags SFDBezierPathSource.)

Which are my preferences?

2008-10-04T05:27:00.000-07:00

If you have Pages running fine for one user on one computer, but you have problems on another, it is possible that the preferences are corrupted.

The quickest and dirtiest way to check this is to delete the preference file -homedirectory-/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iWork.Pages.

However, if you want to check for the exact difference in preferences between the two files you can follow the following steps.

Launch the Terminal (Application > Utilities > Terminal).
Type the command defaults read com.apple.iWork.Pages |less
Hit enter.

You will now get a list of all preferences set for Pages for the active user. It will look something like this:


{
"AppleNavServices:PutFile:0:Disclosure" = <01>;
"AppleNavServices:PutFile:0:HomeDirectoryPath" = "file://~/Desktop/";
"AppleNavServices:PutFile:0:Path" = "file://localhost/Users/Magnus/Desktop/";
"AppleNavServices:PutFile:0:Position" = <01b201ba>;
and so on...

To move to the next page, press space. To move up one page, type b. To get more information about navigating around, press h. To leave the display to be able to type another command, type q.

Using the command defaults you can also change individual values, if needed.

Warning! When you change those values by hand, you may make things worse than they were before, unless you are careful. Make sure you know what you are doing. You can try the commands out in a test account, before you change things in the main account, if you are unsure.

Let's say that you are interested in the following preference:

MediaBrowserVisibility = 0;

You realise that means that the Media Browser is invisible in Pages. (It actually means that it is invisible by default, when Pages starts.) To change it to visible, you type the following text. The full line may not display well in your browser, but you can copy the line. When you paste it in Terminal, it will paste the full line.

defaults write com.apple.iWork.Pages MediaBrowserVisibility 1

Next time you open Pages the Media Browser will be visible.


defaults write com.apple.iWork.Pages MediaBrowserVisibility 0

And it will be invisible next time you open Pages.

Remember that you will have to close Pages and reopen it for it to take the changed values into account.

Using Aperture with Pages

2008-07-10T23:46:00.000-07:00

There are some hints how to use Aperture with Pages at the blog Photo Phindings.

index.xml.gz and corruption

2008-06-09T16:42:00.000-07:00

Under certain non-identified circumstances the file index.xml.gz can be corrupted. According to posts in Apple's discussion forums by Yvan Koenig, who usually knows what he is talking about, the corruption can be avoided by using Save As... instead of Save. The conclusion is to make frequent Save As... actions as backups, if you work on important large documents.

To rescue some information from a corrupted document, you can right click (ctrl-click) on the corrupted document and choose "Show package content" and look for a file called index.xml or index-new.xml. Copy the xml file to the desktop (for example) and open it with TextEdit. The content does not look nice, but text you have entered is partly readable.

If you only have a file called index-new.xml you can try the following steps:

Copy the entire corrupted document, so you have a backup just in case.
Rename the file index-new.xml to index.xml (with or without gz depending on the original).
Open the file in Pages.

If you are lucky that works.

TextEdit and Styles

2008-05-17T07:15:00.000-07:00

In case you use TextEdit as well as Pages, you will have noticed that TextEdit has an unusual and sometimes buggy way of handling styles.

If you click on the "Styles" control in TextEdit's toolbar, you will at first only see Favorite Styles.

A Favorite Style can be used in any TextEdit document for this user on this computer, but nowhere else. It is stored in the hidden file .GlobalPreferences.plist.

If you click on "Other...", you will get to a window where you can see the Document Styles. In contrast to almost all other programs, a Document Style in TextEdit has no customisable name.

It just contains some sample text ("ONE" in the picture above), which has a particular format. All formats used in the document appear as you click the arrows back and forth.

To create a Favorite Style from the current format, click on the button "Add To Favorites" and give it a name, and choose if you want the font and ruler information to be part of the style.

To delete a Favorite Style, click on the radio button Favorite Styles, select the style you want to delete and click on Remove From Favorites.

If you click on Select, you can choose to select where the style is used, based on different criteria.

You click on Apply, the active style is applied to the currently selected text.

Done in the Style window just closes the window.

If you do not have the Ruler active, you can still use Styles with the menus: Format > Font > Style

There is no easy way to edit an existing Favorite Style. The steps are:

Apply the style to some text.
Modify the text to the new format you want.
Add the new format as a new Favorite Style with the same name as the old style.
Accept the warning that you are replacing an existing style.

There is no way of telling which style is applied to a particular piece of text. That information is not stored and not displayed.

Personally, I think it is questionable if TextEdit's styles are better than no styles at all. It is clear that there has been some development effort, but the design does not seem to have gone through any usability tests. Still, if they fulfill any of your particular needs, there is of course no harm in using them.

i

2008-04-06T02:32:00.000-07:00

Several languages, like Catalan, Croatian, Italian and most Scandinavian languages have a word that consists of the single letter "i".

The problem is that if you launch Pages 3.0 or Pages 4.0 in English and have switched on Fix Capitalization in the preferences, then the word "i" will automatically become "I", even if you type in another language than English. The Danish (and Norwegian and Swedish) phrase "gå i land" will become "gå I land".

The silly thing is that Pages assumes that you want the capitalisation rules of the language you run the software in - not the language you set in Inspector > Text > more.

There are a few solutions here.

Switch Fix Capitalization off.
Launch Pages in a non-English language, like French, Italian or German. (Drag the language to the top in System Preferences > International > Languages, before you launch Pages.)
Hack. This is one of those things that can go seriously wrong unless you are careful, but if you succeed things will work fine:

Control-click on the application Pages, and choose "Show Package Contents".
Go to /Contents /Frameworks /SFWordProcessing.framework /Versions /A /Resources /English.lproj.
Make a copy of AutoCorrect.plist as a backup and put it for example on the Desktop, in case things go wrong.
Open the file AutoCorrect.plist with for example TextEdit. You will find two lines with the following text somewhere in the file under capitalizationDictionary: <key>i</key> <string>I</string>
Remove that text. Save the file.
Relaunch Pages.

The inconvenience here is that even if you type in English, it no longer will correct i to I.

Pages crashes. What should I do?

2008-04-02T10:56:00.000-07:00

Just like any application on any operating system, Pages may crash on you - or "quit unexpectedly", as the politically correct term is. To some of us that happens not even once a year. To some of us it happens every time we try to edit a table or access the colour dialogue or whenever we try to save a file. Perhaps Pages will not even start. You may get confusing messages about the SFWordProcessing plugin or EXC_BAD_ACCESS or KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS or EXC_BREAKPOINT, which will invoke memories of that DOS PC you used to have 20 years ago.

These are some of the things you can do to fix or isolate the problem. You can do them in any order you like.

In /Library/Caches (in the root of your harddisk), trash the files ending with .csstore and then restart.
In ~/Library/Caches/ (under your home directory), trash com.apple.iWork.Pages.plist .
In ~/Library/Preferences (under your home directory), trash com.apple.iWork.Pages.plist .
Remove any third party applications like spellcatcher.
Clean up your spelling tools.
Open FontBook, select all fonts and then File > Validate Fonts.
Reset the font cache.
Use another account than your main one. If that works, you know that the problem is in your main account. In your main account try removing file by file from ~/Library until things work. Try to remove them in an intelligent way. For example: create a new folder under Preferences called "old preferences" and drag every file that was in preferences into the new folder and then restart. After the restart you can drag the files back from "old preferences" to "Preferences" one by one, until things crash. Then you have found an offending file.
Repair permissions from Disk Utility. Also verify your disk, just in case.
Disable Spaces, if you have it active.
If you run Pages from an external drive - don't. Copy it to your harddisk and run it from there.
If you use Toast Titanium, something strange may be happening with the DivX plugin. Try reinstalling Toast with and without the DivX plugin, and see if that improves things.
Delete iWork and reinstall it from the installation DVD.
If nothing else works, reformat the harddisk and re-install the system. Do not add any additional fonts or programs. Just start Pages. If it still crashes, you are very likely to have a hardware problem and should bring the Mac to a service provider.

Print shops and embedded fonts

2008-03-23T23:36:00.000-07:00

With some print shops you may get an error back saying something like "This file was created with Mac OS X 10.4.11 Quartz PDFContext / Pages. We cannot print files created with this application."

Mac OS X embeds several subsets of the same font, just like many other applications. However, for some reason some printers (like Lulu) are not able to handle the way Mac OS X does it.

A solution that in some cases works is to create the PDF using Print > PDF > Print to PDF-X. In contrast to a standard PDF, which can be used for many purposes, a PDF-X file is dedicated to facilitate printing.

You can find some more information at the following sites:

How do I type Wingdings in Pages?

2008-03-02T03:21:00.000-08:00

Wingdings and Webdings are fonts with small images instead of the letters. My personal recommendation is that you do not use them, even if you have the fonts. This is why:

Every document you type will be read by someone - either by someone else or by yourself in a few minutes, days or years. A document you type with Latin letters or any standard unicode letters is likely to be legible by anyone with the right software - today and in the future. But Wingdings is not standard unicode.

Now, let's assume that you want to show the yin-and-yang symbol to a reader.

You know that it is part of the Wingdings font, so you decide to get the symbol there.

So what you can do is to activate the Keyboard Viewer. Then select Wingdings from the menu in the bottom left corner and then select Wingdings as font in Pages and start typing.

However, when you send this Pages document to another computer user, it is very possible that he will not have the Wingdings font, so the character will not display. What is displayed is just "[" because that is the character that Wingdings uses to display the yin-yang symbol.

And the same thing can happen to you. When you change the paragraph style in this document, the symbol will become "[". If you copy the text to another application, it will become "[". If you export it to RTF and then open it in TextEdit, it will become "[". It is basically a very unstable character - just like all other characters in Wingdings, Webdings and Monotype Sorts.

TextEdit does not even allow you to type the character, and that is probably a wise choice. You can insert it from the Character Palette to TextEdit. You find it in the Character Palette with the View PIFonts, Font: Wingdings-Regular. However, what is inserted is the unicode F05B which is in the Private Area. The Private Area means that it can be used by anyone for anything, so depending on the available font, it can appear as completely different characters.

As you do not know which font the reader will have available, you will not know what the document will look like to him. That's why it usually is best to avoid Wingdings fonts altogether.

There are perhaps cases where you need to use them, but try to make sure you have a normal picture as a backup - just in case. You can also use Wingdings to create PDF files, as PDFs usually embed the font.

How do I import and export text files in different encodings?

2008-03-01T11:57:00.000-08:00

Pages does not pretend to be a text editor. If you want to edit text files, you are much better off using TextEdit or other programs.

When you Export a text file from Pages, it usually uses either Western (Mac OS Roman) or unicode UTF16 as encoding. You cannot choose which encoding you want, and you cannot for sure tell what encoding it was, unless you verify in some other program like TextWrangler.

When you import text files, Pages can usually open UTF16 without any problem and usually also Western (Mac OS Roman). Pages is unable to open the common UTF8 format.

The workaround is to always use TextEdit or another program for text files. You can then copy the content to Pages - if you want to.

How do I create my own Color Palette?

2008-02-28T10:14:00.000-08:00

Sometimes you may want to use a limited number of colours for a document. Let's for example say that you want certain words in blue. If you use the standard Color Wheel in the color window (View > Show Colors), you may end up with slightly different shades of blue, depending on where you click.

To be sure that you always select the same colour, you can drag colours from the rectangle next to the magnifying glass to the strip at the bottom of the window.

The strip contains 15 squares by default, and that should be more than enough for most people. However, if you need more, you can drag the the dot below to make room for more squares.

You may need several sets of colours. Let's for example say that you want one particular set of three colours in one document but another set of three colours in another document. You can handle that as well in the Color window, using the third tab, called "Color Palettes".

Here you can choose between a few pre-defined palettes, like Apple, Web Safe Colors or Developer, but you can also create your own ones, clicking on the wheel, and choosing "New".

You can of course rename both the colours and the colour palettes to whatever names you like.

So, how do you select colours for your palettes? You can do this in (at least) two ways.

One is to click on the magnifying glass and then click on an area of the screen that has a colour you want to capture.

The other method is to select a colour using one of the other icons on the top. Then go back to the "Color palettes" icon.

After you have selected a colour, you drag it into the empty area of your palette or click on the + button. That's it. You do not even have to save, as the colour palette has auto-save (in contrast to Pages documents).

What are the most frequent of the frequent questions?

2008-02-26T17:01:00.000-08:00

It is very difficult to tell what the most frequently asked questions are about Pages. Looking at Apples Discussion forums one can get one impression. Looking at this blog a different one.

This is a graph of the most common keyword categories that have led people to this blog this February 2008:

The most common keyword is about a missing function: autosave. One out of eight people who find this site with a search engine come here because they miss an autosave function.

The next keyword is about possibilities: applescript. That is actually good news - people want to extend and adapt the program for their own needs.

The following point, however, is again about a missing function: wordart. It may be questionable if it would make sense to include a word art module in Pages, but it is not questionable if it is an often wished for function.

The next one is again about missing functionality, but it is not missing in Pages itself. A lot of people ask for means to read Pages files on Windows or on Macs, where Pages is not installed. Most often, what they dream of is a viewer.

The following three points, rotations (of graphics, tables, text), attachments to mails and a mean to set a default font, are all available, but the user interfaces of Pages and Mac OS X are not intuitive enough for everyone to find the functions.

The last one in the diagram is password protection, something many programs offer from within the program itself. When it comes to iWork, however, password protection has to take place in an external program, Disk Utility.

There are plenty of other searches that lead to this blog - about fonts, typography, colour schemes, Japanese features, and so on.

My own wish would be that Pages one day will be so intuitive and powerful that this kind of blog has no purpose any more. However, that does not seem to happen any time soon.

Why can't I Copy a Character Style?

2008-02-24T02:22:00.000-08:00

Sometimes the menu item Format > Copy Character Style is greyed out, even though you know you have changed something in the formatting.

The most likely reason is that you changed formatting for the paragraph, but not for the character - at least not directly.

Here the paragraph is selected:
Note the character at the end of the word.

Here just a word is selected:
Change formatting for the paragraph, and the Character Style is not updated. Change formatting for a word or individual characters, and the Character Style is updated and can be copied.

Smart quotes, do they work?

2008-02-14T12:27:00.000-08:00

In Pages Preferences > Auto Correction, you can select "Use smart quotes", which automatically turns " to “ or ” depending on the context, so "hello" becomes “hello”. This works fine for English. However, in many other languages the rules are different so quotation marks and apostrophes can be some of the following characters in different combinations:

‚ „ ’ ” “ « » ‹ ›

Smart quotes work the English way, when you run Pages in English or any other language except German. When you run it in German it applies the quotation marks like this: „hallo“, which is correct for German.

Pages gets this information from the language in System Preferences > International > Language. It does not get it from the language set in the Inspector > Text > More.

This is sometimes exactly what you want. If you write an English text and add a German quotation, you may not want a German Anführungszeichen for that single phrase.

In many cases you have to type the characters manually. This is the case if you want to type «guillemets», like in French or Italian.

To find out how to type a character with your particular keyboard layout, use the Keyboard Viewer.

Wikipedia has much more information regarding the use of quotation marks or apostrophes.

How do I select all instances of font X?

2008-02-10T04:17:00.000-08:00

Paste and run the following script in Applications > AppleScript > Script Editor:

tell application "Pages"
 select (every character of body text of front document whose font name is "Times-Roman")
end tell

Note that the font name may not be what you expect. The script above searches for the font "Times", even though the name in the script is "Times-Roman". If you type just "Times", it will not work.

If you need help to see what font name AppleScript expects, mark the first word of Pages front document in the desired font, and run this script:

tell application "Pages"
 display dialog (font name of word 1 of body text of front document as string)
end tell

(Sorry for the bad formatting above. Blogspot is not made to display source code. However, even if you cannot see the last characters on all rows, they should paste fine when you copy them.)

Resizing pictures with AppleScript

2008-02-09T11:27:00.000-08:00

on open theImages
repeat with anImage in theImages
tell application "Image Events"
--Set the maximum dimension of the picture.
-- If it is in landscape mode, it is the width.
-- If it is in portrait mode, it is the height.
set the targetSize to 240
set currentImage to open anImage
set imageType to currentImage's file type
scale currentImage to size targetSize
tell application "Finder" to set newImage to (container of anImage as string) & "scaled " & (name of anImage)
save currentImage in newImage as imageType
end tell
end repeat
end open

3. Save the script as an "Application".

4. Drag your image to the new script Application.

You will get a new file with the new dimension.

If you prefer to scale to a certain percentage, use this script instead:

on open theImages
repeat with anImage in theImages
tell application "Image Events"
-- Set the variable targetSize to the scale factor. 0.5 means 50%.
set the targetSize to 0.5
set currentImage to open anImage
set imageType to currentImage's file type
scale currentImage by factor targetSize
tell application "Finder" to set newImage to (container of anImage as string) & "scaled " & (name of anImage)
save currentImage in newImage as imageType
end tell
end repeat
end open

The accepted image formats are BMP, JPEG, JPEG2, PICT, PNG, PSD, QuickTime Image and TIFF.

If you feel more comfortable with Automator, you can use that as well.

Resizing pictures with Automator

2008-02-08T10:27:00.000-08:00

If you resize a picture inside a Pages document, it will just look like it is smaller. In reality, it takes up as much diskspace as before. You have not lost any information. However, sometimes you really need to free up some diskspace, and you need to resize the picture for real. You have to do that outside Pages. The most obvious tool to do is Preview (Tools > Adjust size).

However, there are a few other options to use. One is to use Automator.

1. Open Automator from your Applications folder.
2. Select "Custom" as starting point.

3. Click on Photos > Scale Images, and drag that icon to the empty workflow area to the right.
4. When you get a question if you want to add a Copy Finder Items action, accept it with "Add".

5. Set the scaling factor to the size or percentage you want to use.

6. Save the workflow as an Application - not a Workflow, which is the default in the Save dialog.

7. Drag an image to the new Automator workflow application.

You will get a new copy with the defined scaling. If you want to change scaling, you do not even have to leave Automator. Just open the workflow application in Automator by dragging it on the Automator icon. Change the value and save, and you are ready to scale again.

This will work with for example jpeg, png, tif or psd files.

It will not work for gif or raw image files.

If you want even more flexibility, you can use these AppleScripts.

How do I display page numbers with Roman numerals?

2008-02-02T00:40:00.000-08:00

Right click (or control-click) on an inserted page number and select the numbering type you want.

Where is the "Normal View"?

2008-02-01T10:59:00.000-08:00

In Pages '09, version 4.0, the "Normal View" is in the menu View > Enter Full Screen.

The following was written for previous version of Pages.

In some applications, there is a mode in which you can ignore formatting and margins and concentrate completely on the text content. The most well known such mode is probably Microsoft Word's "Normal View". Even a dedicated layout program like Adobe InDesign has its "Story Editor". Unfortunately Pages has nothing like that. There is no way to hide margins and page breaks.

There are a few other programs that have a full screen view, where all distractions on the screen are hidden even more efficiently than in Word or InDesign. In these programs you see the text and nothing else. Even the menus are gone. Examples of such applications for Mac OS X are Scrivener, Nisus, WriteRoom and CopyWrite. None of them is free.

The Poor Man's Solution

However, there is also a free solution. You may not like it, but I will tell you anyhow. It is to go back to the stone age before graphical user interfaces. Follow these steps:

Log out.
Highlight one of the users, and type alt-Enter. You will now get fields to type Name and Password instead of choosing them from a list.
In the Name field, type ">console" (without the quotation marks). Leave the password field blank.
Press Enter. You are now in character based mode.
Type your login name. (Not the free form one displayed in the Login window, but the name of your home directory.)
Press Enter.
Type your password.
Press Enter. You are in! (If all went well.)

All you now need to do is to learn how to use a character based editor like emacs or vi.

You are now in the serene land of text only editing. There are no mail or chat programs to distract, no internet browsers, no bright colours - just letters and your creativity.

Once you are tired of text mode, you can return to the real Mac OS X by typing "exit" on the command prompt. A shortcut for this is to type ctrl-d.

Once you are back in Mac OS X, you can open the text file you created with emacs or vi and paste its content into a Pages document, to get the layout right. The result of your creativity deserves it.

Why did Pages' characters look blurry?

2008-01-31T12:37:00.000-08:00

With Pages 3.0 and earlier, many users perceived problems with blurriness around the characters. With Pages '09/Pages 4.0 Apple changed the way fonts are rendered, which makes them look darker or sharper than they did before.

The word below is written using Helvetica 10 and rendered at 100% size. The top rendering is Pages '09 and the lower one is Pages 3.0. Surprisingly the top rendering looks better on an LCD screen than the lower one.

This uses the default setting in System Preferences > Appearance > Font smoothing style. With Pages '09, this setting is taken into account, unlike previous versions.

If you want to turn font smoothing off, open a terminal window and use the command

defaults write com.apple.iWork.Pages SFRFontSmoothing 0

If you want to turn it back on, use the command

defaults write com.apple.iWork.Pages SFRFontSmoothing 1

The text below was written for previous versions. It contains more explanations of what was wrong.
---

Most letters have some round curves, and that is a problem, as current computer screens consist of a lot of small dots, not curves.

The process of mapping the round curves of letters to pixels is called font rasterisation. There are different strategies to do it.

Last millennium one of the most common strategies was to simply put black dots in logical places. AppleWorks uses that method, and the result is that the letters get very rough edges. Here is the word "lollipop" written in Helvetica, 10 in AppleWorks. It is magnified about 10 times, so you can see the pixels.
The next strategy was to use anti-aliasing. That means that you add pixels of different shades of grey to increase the illusion that the letters are curved. It looks ridiculous when you magnify it, but when the font is small, it is surprisingly efficient. It is very likely that your web brower uses anti-aliasing to display the characters you read right now. Magnified, the characters do not look very legible:

But on a screen, it does not look quite that bad:

This is still the most efficient strategy, if you have a CRT (Cathode ray tube) screen. It is also the method Pages uses. However, fewer and fewer people use CRT screens nowadays.

For LCD screens, the best strategy is usually subpixel rendering. This uses the fact that each pixel on an LCD screen consists of three small elements, one red, one green and one blue. Looking at a magnified image of these pixels gives the impression that it is almost illegible. However, when one takes into account that the colour elements are at different positions inside each pixel, it is easier to understand that this can actually be easier to read than plain anti-aliased text.

On the screen it looks a little better. Keep in mind that this is my screen magnified about 10 times.

As you can see, the monitor does not simply display the colours right off, but there is some algorithm how to display it correctly.

To some people this gives a much clearer picture. To others it is mostly annoying, as they are able to see the different colours, in spite of the small size. This is a technology used by for example TextEdit and MS Word for Mac. Your browser may also use it.

Using System Preferences > Appearance, you can change this setting for TextEdit and Microsoft Word and many other applications. If you choose CRT, you disable the subpixel rendering in the applications.
However, these settings hardly change anything at all for Pages.

Why does Pages not allow subpixel rendering? The most convincing explanation may be that it is more difficult to implement in Pages than in other applications, as text can be transparent against a coloured background. It would be very difficult to choose how to handle transparent coloured pixels, when the background changes colour.

Besides, the number of pixels per inch increases all the time with more modern screens. In the near future, it will not matter much which technology is used to map curves to pixels.

So, what can one do, if one thinks Pages displays too blurry characters on the screen today?

Not much. One can either get used to it or buy a new screen with higher resolution or simply increase the zoom.

If you want to learn more about font rendering in Mac OS X, here is a list of facts and opinions on the subject:

And after Pages '09

Pages ’09: Two significant breakthroughs

Export folder to Word, RTF, PDF, TXT or RTFD

2008-01-30T10:17:00.000-08:00

This AppleScript to export the content of a folder with Pages documents was kindly created by Yvan Koenig. You can find more of his scripts at his Public iDisk. If you prefer to export a selection of files, you may want to have a look at the scripts in this post, which use a Scriptlet.

To use the script below, copy it all into a new script in ScriptEditor and run. Due to blogspot's layout, you may not see all characters here, but they should be copied properly, if you highlight all the non-proportional text below.

(*
Export pages documents as Word ones in the folder where the original docs where.

Assuming that we start with:
AppleScript & Office.pages
it will be exported as:
AppleScript & Office.doc
If a file already exist with the short name
it may be saved as:
AppleScript & Office#20080128T221639.doc  (if withSeconds is defined as true)
AppleScript & Office#20080128T2219.doc  (if withSeconds is defined as false)

the serial number is a packed version of the date/time of the save process:

2008/01/28T22:16:39  or  2008/01/28T22:16

Thanks to Dale GILLARD who teach me the way to export without using GUI scripting.

Yvan KOENIG
28 janvier 2008
29 janvier 2008
*)

property withSeconds : false (* you may set it to true if you wish *)
property typeNum : 1 (* 1 = WORD, 2 = PDF, 3 = Txt, 4 = rtf, 5 = rtfd *)

property newExt : ""
property newType : ""
property types : {{"doc", "SLDocumentTypeMSWord"}, {"pdf", "SLDocumentTypePDF"}, {"txt", "SLDocumentTypePlainText"}, {"rtf", "SLDocumentTypeRichText"}, {"rtfd", "SLDocumentTypeRichTextBundle"}}

tell application "Finder" to set listeFichiers to every item in (choose folder) (*
dans un bloc Finder pour avoir un titre de dialogue "localisé"
• in a Finder block to get a localized dialog title. *)
if (count of listeFichiers) = 0 then return
open listeFichiers

-- ===========

on open (sel)
repeat with elem in sel
my exploreTraite(elem as alias, "")
end repeat
end open

-- ===========

on exploreTraite(elem, ptree) (*
elem est un alias
elem is an alias *)
local elem_, cl_, typeId_
set elem_ to elem as text
tell application "System Events"
set cl_ to class of item elem_
set typeId_ to type identifier of elem
end tell
set cl_ to cl_ as Unicode text

if cl_ is "file package" then
if typeId_ is "com.apple.iwork.pages.pages" then my TraiteUnPackage(elem_, ptree)
else if cl_ is "folder" then
my ExploreUnDossier(elem_, ptree)
else
-- not for us
end if -- cl_ is …
end exploreTraite

-- ===========

on ExploreUnDossier(dossier, ptree)
local nomElement, cheminElement, c
repeat with nomElement in list folder dossier without invisibles
set cheminElement to dossier & nomElement
tell application "Finder" to set c to name of (dossier as alias)
my exploreTraite(cheminElement as alias, ptree & c & ":")
end repeat
end ExploreUnDossier

-- ===========

on TraiteUnPackage(aPackage, ptree)
local docPathAndName, oldName, docName, newExt, newType
(* aPackage always ends with a colon, we must remove it *)
set aPackage to (text 1 thru -2 of (aPackage as Unicode text)) as alias

set {newExt, newType} to types's item typeNum
tell application "Finder"
set sourceFolder to (container of aPackage) as Unicode text
set oldName to name of aPackage as Unicode text
end tell -- Finder
set docName to (text 1 thru -6 of oldName) & newExt
set docPathAndName to sourceFolder & docName

tell application "System Events"
if exists file docPathAndName then
 set docName to (text 1 thru -7 of oldName) & my serialize() & "." & newExt
 set docPathAndName to sourceFolder & docName
end if
end tell -- system events

tell application "Pages"
open aPackage
save front document as newType in docPathAndName
close front document
end tell -- Pages
end TraiteUnPackage

-- =============

on serialize()
local cd, serial
set cd to current date
set serial to (year of cd as text) & text -2 thru -1 of ("0" & (month of cd as number)) & text -2 thru -1 of ("0" & day of cd) & "T" & text -2 thru -1 of ("0" & hours of cd) & text -2 thru -1 of ("0" & minutes of cd)
if withSeconds then
return "#" & serial & text -2 thru -1 of ("0" & seconds of cd)
else
return "#" & serial
end if
end serialize

How do I best organise my fonts in Fontbook?

2008-01-28T11:44:00.000-08:00

You may have read in some obscure blog posting that it is good to organise your fonts in Collections in Fontbook. That obscure posting was right, but what strategy should you use to create collections? Which criteria should you use?

You should of course create one or a few folders with your favourite fonts, based entirely on what you like.

In addition, it may be good to create folders based on some objective criteria, and to do so, you can often use the search field.

You can for example start with a search for fonts that contain Italic typefaces.

1. Create a collection called "Italics".
2. Type "Italic" in the search field. The font list now only contains fonts which match the word Italic.

3. Select all fonts with command-A.

4. Clear the search field. The selection now extends to all typefaces in the fonts that contain italics.

5. Drag the selection to the collection "Italics".

You now have a collection with fonts that you can italicize ready to be used in Pages or TextEdit or any other application using the Font Palette.

But you can go on.

6. Create another collection called "Italics Slimbach".
7. Click on the Italics collection and type "slimbach" in the search field and repeat the steps above.

You now have a selection with fonts by the designer Robert Slimbach, which all contain Italic typefaces.

And on again.

8. Go through the steps above again, but this time use the search word "Russian".

And you have a collection of Slimbach's fonts that can be used in Russian with Italics.

You can go on like this and create collections with more and more detailed criteria in different areas. You can for example search for "Apple" or "Adobe" to find fonts from those companies. Or you can search for OpenType or Postscript.

There are, however, two things that seem impossible to search for reliably: non-proportional fonts and sans serif fonts.

If you need that you need to create the collections manually. But there are still quite a lot of different kinds of collections you can create using the search function.

How do I create an index in Pages?

2008-01-27T01:29:00.000-08:00

If you want an index of keywords in Pages, you have to create it manually. Contrary to the table of contents functionality, there is no automatic solution for indexes.

People have different strategies to create them, usually based on the search function. You can for example get a list of all pages containing a particular word using View > Show Search.

How do I use Quartz Composer?

2008-01-26T14:22:00.000-08:00

Uh? Isn't that a development graphics tool? What does that have to do with Pages?

Admittedly not very much, but for some situations you may want to use Quartz Composer to modify pictures or text you have converted to an image. There are better and easier tools out there, but none is cheaper than Quartz Composer as it comes with the OS. If you want to experiment with it, here is some advice to get you going:

Install the Development Tools from your Mac OS X installation DVD, unless you already have them.
Go to Developer > Applications, and open Quartz Composer.
Create a new file from the template "Image Filter". (The main differences between this one and a blank file is the fact that the a flag in Editor > Edit Protocol Performance already is set to "Image Filter", which makes sure you get all required patches.)
Remove the optional elements and the macro called "Process the Image".
Go to Editor > Show Patch Parameters.
Double-click on the image, and choose the image you want to use yourself.
Click on Edit > Show Patch Creator.
Choose any patch you fancy, for example Image Transform. (Others, like Twirl, also work.)
Click on the Output node on the patch "Image (required) _protocolInput_Image" and drag it to the left Image node of "Image Transform", so you get a yellow line that links the two.
Click on the node "Transformed Image" from Image Transform and drag it to the Input node of the patch "Image (required) _protocolOutput_Image".
(Optional) You can also add a Filter like "Circular Wrap Distortion" before the Image Transform. The method is the same as when you added the patch in step 8. You just have to connect the nodes.
Unless the Viewer is already visible, go to Window > Show Viewer.
Unless it is already running, click on the Run button.
Click on the patch Image Transform and change its parameters.
Experiment. Change or add other patches, to see the changes.
If you find a result you like, save the file.
Drag the file you created to an open Pages document, where it will appear as an image - or actually a movie - in case you added any moving elements.

How do I create Word Art with Pages?

2008-01-26T13:44:00.000-08:00

You cannot.

If you want to let the letters dance over the page following curves or shapes, you have to go beyond Pages.

A few other products that support wordart like features are Art Text and Comic Life, but there are more ones out there. You can check Version tracker for more alternatives.

How do I add keyboard shortcuts?

2008-01-22T13:47:00.000-08:00

To see Pages' keyboard shortcuts, you can go to the Help menu > Keyboard Shortcuts.

Just like in any other Mac OS application, you can also see at the end of each menu command, if there is shortcut for it.

To add your own shortcuts to menu items follow these steps

Go to System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > Keyboard Shortcuts.
Click on the + symbol.
Select Pages from the Application list. The first time you will have to select the last value, "Other...", to add Pages to the list, as the list by default only contains applications directly in the Applications folder. Applications in sub-folders have to be added manually.
Type the exact name of a menu command, for example "Export..."
Press a keyboard combination including shift (⇧), control (⌃), alt (⌥) and/or command (⌘) and one other key, for example ⌃⌥⇧⌘E.
Click "Add".

From now on Pages accepts ⌃⌥⇧⌘E as a shortcut to bring up the Export window, which you can see by pulling down the menu again.

There are some things to think about here. You can basically only assign shortcuts to menus. You can for example not add shortcuts to items in the inspector. Even though you can write "macros" for Pages using AppleScript, there is no way to assign shortcuts to the macros, as they reside in the Finder. However, you can assign "hotkeys" to Styles by clicking on the triangle next to the name in the Styles Drawer.

If there are several menu items with the same name, only one of them will get the shortcut.

If you change language in System Preferences, the shortcut will no longer work.

How do I attach a Pages document to an email?

2008-01-22T10:55:00.000-08:00

In Pages '08 and earlier, each Pages document was a folder packages, something that confused a lot of mail programs.

In Pages '09, the files are just standard files by default. (You can change the default behaviour to packages in the preferences.) One easy way to mail files is to use the "Share" menu. Here you can send the front document using Mail.app in different formats.

If you want to mail a package, you can do that too:

1. Control-click or right-click on the file in Finder.

2. Choose "Compress ...." from the pop up menu.
3. You will get an "archive", a compressed zip-file, which you can attach to your mail, just like any other file.

The recipient will download the attachment, double click on it, and the original iWork file will be ready to be opened by Pages, Numbers or Keynote.

How do I change the default zoom?

2008-01-20T12:39:00.000-08:00

New documents always come up with the same zoom value (the percentage in the lower left corner of the document window). Sometimes that is far too big or far too small, so you may want to change it.

The simplest and safest way is to go to the menu Pages > Preferences, and change the Default Zoom value.

However, you may want to change it to a value that is not in the preferences dialogue, let's say 99%, for the sake of argument.

If you want to change the zoom for the current document only, you can use an AppleScript:

tell window 1 of application "Pages"
set view scale to 99
end tell

If you want to change the default value for all new documents, and you are willing to take a certain risk, you can manually edit the file ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iWork.Pages.plist and set the parameter SLDefaultsPageScale to 0.9900000 (for 99%).

In Mac OS X before 10.7, you can also run the following command in the terminal. (Copy the entire line until 0.99 - not only what is visible. Blogspots HTML hides the end of the line.)

defaults write com.apple.iWork.Pages SLDefaultsPageScale 0.99

How do I add line numbers?

2008-01-18T22:45:00.000-08:00

Pages does not have any easy switch to show or hide sequential numbers for each row.

You can switch on paragraph numbering in the Inspector > Text > List, but as soon as a paragraph goes over several lines, it will be out of sync.

Apple suggests that you create a numbered text box and put it on the master slide.

However, that kind of list will not work if you change the font size, like for a title, or if you insert an image that spans the full page width and disrupts the numbering.

Spelling does not work. What can I do?

2008-01-16T10:34:00.000-08:00

There are a couple of things to try:

Highlight all text and verify in the Inspector > Text > More, that a language is chosen.
"Clean up" the document by exporting it to some other format (MS Word or old Pages formats for example), and import it again.
Go to Applications > Utilities and run Disk Utility. Go to First Aid > Repair Disk Permissions. (It actually has worked for people with this problem.)
You may have an old version of CocoAspell. Update to a newer version, and the problem may go away. (If you do not even have it installed, do not bother upgrading, of course.)
Check username/Library/Services. If you see a file called "Spell Catcher Services.service", delete it, log out, and log back in.
Check username/Library/Services. If you see a file called "aspell.service", delete it, log out, and log back in.
Remove files from username/Library/Spelling
Check Username/Library/Application Support. If you have a folder there called "Spell Catcher", remove it.
Go to /Library/Caches and trash all files ending with .csstore, and then reboot.

How do I compress images in Pages?

2008-01-16T09:59:00.001-08:00

You cannot.

Any image you import to Pages stays its original quality and size to allow print outs and exported PDF files to be as good as possible.

If you really want to save space, you have to compress the original image file in an external graphics editor, like iPhoto, Photoshop, Aperture, the gimp, or many others. This is not the place to evaluate which one is best, but there is a list of some possible ones at Wikipedia.

Even though you cannot compress the images within Pages, note that for the finished document, you can export a compressed PDF version from Pages using Share > Export. (Before Pages '09, the menu was File > Export.)

Where did all those tabs come from?

2008-01-13T12:30:00.000-08:00

When you open a Pages document, it has no visible tabulator stops at all.

However, there is a hidden set of default tab stops, just like in Open Office, Microsoft Word and many other word processors.

As soon as you add a manual tab stop to a paragraph, all previous default tabs disappear:

The distance between the hidden default tabs is defined in the inspector.

However, sometimes a paragraph suddenly gets plenty of visible tabs:

This can happen if you paste text from applications like TextEdit or AppleWorks. These applications do not have the concept of hidden default tabs, so they have to use real visible tabs instead.

The easiest way to get rid of them is to apply a paragraph style without tabs. You can often simply click on the red triangle to the right of the style name and choose "Revert to Defined Style".

Why can't I add Reflections or Adjust an Image?

2008-01-13T12:01:00.000-08:00

The text below was written before Pages '09. With Pages '09, you can add reflections to shapes, but the other restrictions remain.

...

If you highlight an object and go to the Inspector > Graphic, it is possible that the Reflections checkbox is greyed out. And if you go to View > Show Adjust Image, it is possible that none of the controls work.

This may be because you
a) have not highlighted anything. (Make sure you clicked on the image.)
b) have highlighted something that is not an image. Images can for example be PNG, JPEG, GIF, TIFF with or without layers and transparency in CMYK, LAB or RGB colour space.

You cannot add reflections to inserted shapes (Insert > Shape > whatever), tables, text or charts, even though you can add shadows and change transparency for them. Neither can you use the Adjust Image window with them.

Reflections work only on images and PDF files you have inserted from elsewhere (for example with Insert > Choose... or drag-and-drop from the Finder).

Adjust Image only works on images but not on inserted PDF files.

Why does Pages have these limitations? It is because PDF files and inserted shapes are vector graphics. They have a completely different way of handling colours. Take for example the slider for "Sharpness". To apply sharpness to bitmap graphics, you simply change the surrounding pixels a little. However, for vector graphics, there is nothing called "surrounding pixels", to that kind of adjustment does not work.

The main problem here is not that Pages does not apply adjustments to vector graphics. The main problem is that it does not provide any user feedback why it cannot be done, and what the user can do to get around the problem.

In this image the left circle is a shape from Insert > Shape > Oval, so it does not accept reflections. The right circle is an image that was dragged onto the document from the Finder, so the reflection works fine.

How do I add an indent?

2008-01-12T06:26:00.000-08:00

There is no keyboard shortcut to add a paragraph indent, as there are in some other programs, but apart from that it works like almost every other word processor.

Display the ruler, if it is not already displayed. (⌘-r)

Drag the small blue rectangle in the ruler so it is to the right of the blue triangle to create an indent.

Drag the small blue rectangle in the ruler so it is to the left of the blue triangle to create a hanging indent. You may have to move the blue triangle first.

You can achieve the same thing by typing numbers in the inspector.

You can also make the paragraph look like it has an indent by starting it with a tab or a couple of spaces, but then you will have to repeat that for every new paragraph. The easiest thing is often to use the ruler or inspector to create an indent, and then to create a new style from the current text, so you can reuse exactly the same format at other places in the document.

Pages prints to the wrong printer. Why?

2008-01-10T10:48:00.000-08:00

Some people have reported Pages to print to the wrong printer all the time. They set up one default printer, but Pages insists on printing to a different one. Apparently Pages sometimes saves printer information in a file or template, so the files want to print on a particular printer. Perhaps this happens after one has changed some printer dependent page setup parameters.

The solution can be to copy the content of the file to another file - preferably one created with another template.

How do I exchange files InDesign, Publisher or other DTP applications?

2008-01-10T10:41:00.000-08:00

There is no easy way to export a file from Pages so it can be opened by Desktop Publishing Applications like Adobe InDesign, Microsoft Publisher or Quark Express. Neither is there any elegant way to export from those applications so one can open the file in Pages.

Let's just look at InDesign as an example of the problems.

From Pages to InDesign

If you copy formatted text from Pages to InDesign, it will loose all the formatting - font, size, typeface and so on.

If you copy a Text Box from Pages to InDesign, it becomes a graphic. You can no longer correct spelling mistakes or change fonts.

If you copy an image with an alpha channel for transparency and the setting Wrap text to follow the contour of the object, and paste it to InDesign, it will be pasted correctly with a transparent part - however, you will have to set the wrap setting as you want it manually - for each image obviously.

From InDesign to Pages

If you copy formatted text from InDesign to Pages, it will keep part of the formatting, like font and size. However, some features that are not supported by Pages, like kerning, will obviously be discarded.

If you copy a Text Box from InDesign to Pages, it becomes a pdf graphic. You can no longer correct spelling mistakes or change fonts.

If you try to Select All in InDesign and copy it to Pages, it will become a non editable pdf graphic of that page.

Solution

If you have a document in the format of another dtp application and want to work on it in Pages instead, the only solution is often to manually copy and paste piece after piece, and then to correct the formatting that was lost.

However, if there is one page, which you want to create in another application, you can usually save it to PDF from that other application, and you can then paste or insert the PDF as a picture to Pages.

Where do I find more templates?

2008-01-09T10:50:00.000-08:00

If you want to find more templates than what is already included with Pages, there are several places on the web where you can find some. Try for example iWorkCommuniy. On the web you can also find some commercial ones that may fit your needs, but make sure you know what you get before you buy them.

As you can import Word files, if you find some nice MS Word templates, you can create Pages templates from them. You may need to change the extension from .dot to .doc to be able to import them.

How do I create macros in Pages?

2008-01-08T09:30:00.000-08:00

The way to create macros in Pages 3.0 is to use AppleScript.

Unfortunately, Pages is not recordable, unlike some programs where you can record a series of actions you perform into an editable script. For Pages you will have to create your scripts manually.

To see what kind of things can be done with Pages, open Applications > AppleScript > Script Editor, and go to the menu File > Open Dictionary > Pages.

To see some examples of scripts people already have made for Pages, make a Google search for "tell application pages".

To get a list of resources about AppleScript in general, use for example Wikipedia.

There is currently no way to add menus or buttons with your own scripts to Pages' menus or toolbars.

Pages' AppleScript dictionary as displayed in Script Editor.

How do I set printer information?

2008-01-05T07:30:00.000-08:00

In contrast to high end Desktop Publishing (DTP) applications, Pages uses standard Mac OS X printing dialogues and features.

This means that you cannot specify things like bleed (additional space for pictures close to the edge), slug (additional space for printer comments) or creep (adjustments for paper thickness in folded pages). Neither can you print or display printer marks.

For most of us, these are not serious limitations. For those who really need the features, however, you should look at other applications.

Above is a print dialogue from InDesign. Most of these features are not available in Pages.

Printer marks that cannot be printed from Pages.

How do I create forms with Pages?

2008-01-05T00:17:00.001-08:00

You cannot. Pages does not support forms.

If you want to create a form to be filled out on paper, you can of course simulate the form fields with pictures and shapes.

If you want to create a form to be filled in using software, with fields, checkboxes, radiobuttons and such things, Pages is not the tool for you. To create forms, you can try Adobe Acrobat, Microsoft Office, OpenOffice or NeoOffice for example. (It is not simple in any of them, and some of them may crash frequently, so prepare yourself with some patience.)

The image above is from Numbers. Numbers has the ability to set values with check boxes, but when you copy those cells to Pages, they strangely enough lose the feature.

The image above is from NeoOffice. Pages does not support any form functionality.

How can I check grammar in a Pages document?

2008-01-01T15:14:00.000-08:00

Pages 3.0 contains no "grammar check" but it contains a "Proofreader", which tests things like these for English texts:

Improper capitalization (like a sentence starting with a lower case letter)
Duplicate words
Using "an" instead of "a"
Full stop inside quotation marks ("He screamed". <> "He screamed.")
Formatting errors (for example, abbreviations that should be spelled out in formal writing)
Jargon
Gender-specific expressions - like "mankind" instead of "humankind" or "humanity".
Date format ("12/24/07" is considered too informal).

With Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) the OS got its own grammar checker, which is not used by Pages 3.0.1. It contains some checks for pure grammatical errors like:

Verb conjugation ("I is". "I have did".)
The difference between "their" and "there" (as in "there house").
Sentence fragments (sentences without a verb - like this one).

To use the OS grammar check, paste the text into TextEdit and verify it there.

However, the OS grammar check does not check for the following issues, which Pages' Proofreader checks for:

Inconsistent spacing or punctuation marks, like "la Arabie" for "l'Arabie" in French.
Complex words like "eventuate" or jargon like "pretty".
Gender words like "mankind".
Date formats.

In some ways the lack of vocabulary check may actually be good, as you sometimes want to write for example "pretty", and Pages cannot switch off that check.

For grammar checks for other problems, try for example MS Word or Grammarian.

How do I add a hyperlink to an image?

2008-01-01T13:58:00.000-08:00

You cannot add a hyperlink to an image or graphics object - only to text. A possible work around is to add a text box with the hyperlink and then to hide the text box setting the opacity to 100%. This solution does work, but it may confuse a reader who may get false matches, if he tries to search for text that happens to be in the hidden text box.

How do I rotate text in Pages?

2007-12-16T12:25:00.000-08:00

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?

2007-12-12T01:15:00.001-08:00

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:

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

Or in MS Word:

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

How does Pages handle captions?

2007-12-11T13:21:00.000-08:00

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?

2007-12-11T12:39:00.000-08:00

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?

2007-12-11T11:00:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-10T23:40:00.000-08:00

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?

2007-12-09T03:14:00.000-08:00

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?

2007-12-06T12:28:00.001-08:00

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?

2007-12-05T11:40:00.000-08:00

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?

2007-12-01T11:57:00.000-08:00

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

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?

2007-12-01T11:47:00.000-08:00

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?

2007-11-30T11:12:00.000-08:00

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?

2007-11-30T09:56:00.000-08:00

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?

2007-11-27T12:08:00.000-08:00

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:

Display the Font palette using ⌘-T or the menu Format > Fonts > Show Fonts.
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:

In the Finder, go to Applications and open Font Book.
In Font Book, highlight all fonts (or the ones you are curious about).
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.
In Script Editor click on "Run".
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?

2007-11-26T11:50:00.001-08:00

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)

2007-11-22T12:18:00.001-08:00

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

2007-11-11T11:22:00.001-08:00

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?

2007-11-11T04:43:00.000-08:00

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?

2007-11-06T12:41:00.000-08:00

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?

2007-11-06T11:01:00.001-08:00

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?

2007-10-13T14:10:00.000-07:00

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?

2007-10-13T10:54:00.000-07:00

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

Insert the fill picture to Pages.
Create a text box with the text you want. Use black text.
Copy the text box.
Open Preview and select File > New from Clipboard.
Save the image as jpeg (to get rid of the transparency of the background).
Copy the image from Preview.
Paste it into Pages.
Position the fill image behind the pasted picture.
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?

2007-10-10T12:24:00.000-07:00

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?

2007-10-10T12:01:00.000-07:00

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?

2007-10-10T11:55:00.000-07:00

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?

2007-10-10T11:50:00.000-07:00

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?

2007-10-10T11:41:00.000-07:00

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?

2007-10-10T11:35:00.000-07:00

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?

2007-10-10T11:24:00.000-07:00

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?

2007-10-05T11:53:00.000-07:00

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?

2007-10-01T10:05:00.000-07:00

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?

2007-09-29T14:18:00.000-07:00

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?

2007-09-28T10:56:00.000-07:00

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?

2007-09-17T10:30:00.000-07:00

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?

2007-09-16T13:47:00.000-07:00

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?

2007-09-09T01:24:00.000-07:00

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?

2007-09-09T01:12:00.000-07:00

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?

2007-08-11T08:57:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-08T22:30:00.000-07:00

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

2007-07-01T00:33:00.000-07:00

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?

2007-02-10T01:08:00.000-08:00

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

Insert a rectangle that covers the entire page.
In the Inspector, set the rectangle's Object Placement to "Fixed on Page".
Uncheck "Object causes wrap".
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.