Why did the layout of my old Pages document change?

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.

Pages crashes. What should I do?

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.

How do I contact Apple about Pages?

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

1. Apple's Discussion forums
   
2. Apple's Pages feedback page
3. Apple's Bug reporting system

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?

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.

My fonts in Leopard are crazy. How do I reset the font cache?

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.

Missing Fonts

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.

When I print a document or save as PDF, Pages crashes. Why?

This can happen if you have inserted a footnote in the document and then removed the footnote text, but not the footnote itself.