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.

Smart quotes, do they work?

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.

Why did Pages' characters look blurry?

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:

• Font smoothing in Pages: It’s about text transparency
• Vista puts Mac OS X font rendering to shame
• Font Rendering: Respecting The Pixel Grid
• What's Wrong With Apple's Font Rendering?
• Font rendering philosophies of Windows and Mac OS X
• Font smoothing, anti-aliasing, and sub-pixel rendering
• Safari is better in Complex Unicode Font (Sub-Pixel) Rendering

And after Pages '09

• Pages ’09: Two significant breakthroughs

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.

What is a "rare" ligature?

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 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 does the layout change when I import a Word document?

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.

Which font is that really?

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.

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.

How do I enter a non breaking space?

Use alt + space instead of the space.

(This is used to keep words together, even if they go over a line break. You may for example have the phrase "R & D", which you for some reason wants to stay on the same line.)

How do I decide where a word is hyphenated at line breaks?

This is a missing feature in Pages.

Many applications use a soft hyphen or discretionary hyphen (unicode 00AD). That is an invisible character in the middle of a word, which only appears when the word needs to be broken into two in a line break.

Let's for example say you want to write an article about something called "efterår". You know the word, and you know that it can be broken into efter-år, if needed. A soft hyphen would be visible only when the word is broken.

Unfortunately, if you try with the soft hyphen 00AD in Pages, you will see that it is visible even when the word does not break: "efter-år".

How come I cannot use Italics and Bold in some fonts?

The first thing you do is to log feedback, pointing out that you are one of thousands of thousands of users who have problems with this, because Apple does not provide proper feedback in the user interface.

The second thing you do is to read the following paragraphs with an explanation:

Only some fonts contain italic (or oblique) typefaces. A program like MS Word tries to italicize those fonts anyhow, and the result is often not that pretty:



In the picture from Microsoft Word 2004 above, the font Baskerville has an italic typeface. The font Baskerville Old Face does not. The normal versions look almost identical, but the italics look completely different. It is of course possible that you prefer the automatic italics of Baskerville Old Face, but a lot of people probably prefer the elaborate dedicated italics typeface of Baskerville.

To avoid automatically generated italics, Pages and TextEdit and a whole lot of other programs simply do not display italics, when none are available, even if the user asks for it:



In the example using Pages above, the solution is simply to use Baskerville instead of Baskerville Old Face. Here we happened to be lucky, as there was an almost identical font with an italic typeface. It may not be that easy for other fonts, but the Font palette shows which fonts contain Italics.




Comparing the samples from Microsoft Word and Pages higher up on the page, you can also see that Word 2004 is unable to render the ligature fi in any of the samples. Pages handles it well in Baskerville, but fails in Baskerville Old Face, as that font does not contain this feature.