Where is the "Normal View"?

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:

1. Log out.
2. 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.
3. In the Name field, type ">console" (without the quotation marks). Leave the password field blank.
   
4. Press Enter. You are now in character based mode.
5. Type your login name. (Not the free form one displayed in the Login window, but the name of your home directory.)
6. Press Enter.
7. Type your password.
8. 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.

How do I set printer information?

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 change kerning in Pages?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WA
TER

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

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

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

Why are some glyphs missing in Pages?

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

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



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



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




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

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

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

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

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

Which languages do Pages and Mac OS X support?

Pages has full support for most major languages in the world, including Chinese and Japanese.

Pages does not support right to left writing, like in Arabic and Hebrew. Neither do MS Word 2004 or MS Word 2008 for Macintosh.

Pages also sometimes has problems with contextual forms in non-Latin languages - especially with OpenType fonts.

For certain languages, like Burmese, Pages does not have full support. Some characters, like ႏ, cannot be displayed for some reason.

Pages does not support vertical writing, so Chinese and Japanese have to be written horizontally. OpenOffice and the English and Japanese versions of MS Word 2004 and MS Word 2008 support vertical text. There was a discussion about this limitation in Pages on Japanese Slashdot in August 2007.

Pages does not support ruby/phonetic guides/furigana/振り仮名 [ふりがな]. OpenOffice and the English and Japanese versions of MS Word 2004 and MS Word 2008 support it, but their implementation is not very elegant. The Japanese version of Adobe InDesign also handles Japanese features. A Western version of InDesign is able to display them but not to modify them.

The following applications have Japanese language features, but they save them in a non-standard format, which makes it difficult to exchange documents with other users: LightWayText, iText, iText Pro. The web pages are in Japanese, but some of those applications also have an English user interface.

There are some scripts that Mac OS X supports, even thought fonts and keyboards are not available by default. For example:

• Bengali/Bangla - free fonts and keyboard available from ekushey.org.
• Kannada - free fonts and keyboard available from nickshanks.com.
• Telugu - free font available from nickshanks.com. Keyboard is available from doe.carleton.ca
• Malayalam - free font available from malayalamlinux. It seems the rendering is not good, however. When you combine the characters ക and െ, the characters should basically switch place, but they do not.
• Sinhala - free font available from nickshanks.com.
• Amharic (and Tigrinya) - several links to free fonts at Ethiopian News Headlines, for example senamirmir

Mac OS X 10.5 does not have sufficient support for Lao, Khmer, Burmese or the Indian language Oriya. Neither does it have support for Nastaʿlīq script, which commonly is used to render Urdu. (This means that there are more than 100 million people who currently are unable to write their own language on a Mac, not counting the 150 million Urdu speakers, who can use standard Arabic script, if they have to.)

For more information about typing in foreign languages check this page.

For more information about using foreign languages on a mac check following resources:

• Unleash Your Multilingual Mac (maintained by Tom Gewecke)
• Multilingual Mac blog (also maintained by Tom Gewecke)
• Chinese Mac (maintained by Eric Rasmussen)
• Chinese Mac newsgroup
• Japanese Pages/iWork discussion forum
• Wikipedia help for Indic scripts