A tempting alternative - Lotus Symphony for Mac OS X?

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:

1. Open Applications > Utilities > Terminal.
2. Type: /Applications/Symphony.app/Contents/MacOS/shared/eclipse/plugins/com.ibm.productivity.tools.gallery.common (Do not press enter!)
3. Press the tab key. This will expand the directory to its full name.
4. Type open . (Yes. With the space and the dot.)
5. 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.

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.

Where did all those tabs come from?

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".

How do I create forms with Pages?

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 do I mix landscape and portrait in the same document?

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:

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

Or in MS Word:

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

People send me .rtf files with pictures in them, but the pictures are not displayed in Pages. What should I do?

Do not use Pages to open those files. Instead use one of the free word processors like OpenOffice or NeoOffice or AbiWord or a pay for word processor like Nisus Express or Mellel or many other ones.

Apart from images, Pages 3.0 cannot handle RTF files with tables either. The solution is the same: use another application.

Sharing Pages documents with MS Word users with or without using the Export command

If someone tells you to use Pages to edit Word documents, I'm afraid you got bad advice. Pages has many features that will not show up in Word documents, and Word has many features that will not show up in Pages documents.

Pages is not built to edit Word documents, which is why you have to Export to Word format and cannot Save. You may like it or not, but that's the way things are.

If you are dead set on using Pages for your MS Word documents, there is a hack at Lee Findlow's site.

Otherwise try OpenOffice and NeoOffice. They are both free. If you do not like them, but prefer something that looks and feels more like MS Word, try MS Word.

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.

Where are the spreadsheets in iWork? How do I import Excel documents?

You cannot import Excel files to Pages 3.0 or earlier. With iWork '08 came the separate application Numbers, which imports .xls and .xlsx files.

Other Mac programs that do have spreadsheets and import Excel files include MS Office, OpenOffice and AppleWorks.

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