OpenOffice 3.0 and Pages 3.0 comparison

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.

OpenType, TrueType, PostScript fonts, which is best?

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

Here is a short summary for each font.

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

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

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

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

EGWORD (removed article)

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

How well does export/import of MS Word documents work?

Before Pages '08, very few people complained about the import of MS Word documents to Pages.

However, when you export a complicated Pages document to MS Word you are likely to lose some formatting, and the layout will change to some degree.

Some features are not supported. Note that not all Word documents contain this kind of features.

• Pages does not support separate page orientation per page, so if you have a Word document where all pages except one have portrait orientation, there will be no difference in Pages. Pages will use the page orientation defined for the first section in the document.
• Pages does not support text frames.
• Pages does not display the full content of table cells that span several pages.
• Word macros will not work.
• Partial paragraph borders will be simplified. All borders except complete outside borders will be removed.
• Italics and bold of fonts without italic and bold typefaces will be lost.
  
• Asiatic vertical text orientation and furigana/ruby/phonetic guides will also be lost.
• And so on...
  

With Pages 3.0 came the possibility to import .docx files from MS Office 2007. At the same time, there seems to be an increased number of complaints about MS Office compatibility in general. It is unclear if this is because the compatibility has become worse, or if more people have started using Pages for Word documents.

The standard Word format version we have come to expect Pages to support is the one used by Word 97 through Word 2003 for Windows, and versions from Word 98 to Word 2004 for Mac. (Internal numbers are Word 8 to Word 11.)

Pages '08 cannot open Word 6.0 or Word 95 formats or earlier. NeoOffice can open them and save to newer versions of Word, which Pages then can read. Even TextEdit can open them but almost all formatting will be lost.

One may note that even MS Word for Windows is not fully backward compatible with itself without a registry update.


A Pages document that almost was saved as a Word document.

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