How do I make Pages autosave my documents?

With the new Mac OS X, Lion, released in July 2011, Pages '09 automatically saves all open documents using Auto Save and Versions. The basic functionality is very easy: open the document, edit, close. That's it. To use Versions and the more advanced functionality, it is a good idea to have a look at Apple's description of the functionality.

However, the autosave functionality is not problem free. There have been reports of people who have lost some data. The data is not autosaved continuously, but at regular intervals, and if you crash your machine between those intervals, text will obviously be lost.

For older versions, there was a problem, which is described below:

Pages '09 before Mac OS X Lion could not automatically save documents, so if you had typed for 5 hours without saving and there is a power failure, you would have lost all your work.

The safest way to handle this is to press ⌘-S to save the document manually as often as possible.

For those who do not trust themselves to remember this, there are a few Applescripts to do this at Apple's discussion forums, for example here and here.

How do I use a VCS with Pages?

The following was written before Pages '09, when Pages files were "packages" and not real files. The problem is probably gone with Pages '09 or later.

The problem with using Concurrent Versions System (CVS), Subversion or another version control systems with Pages, is not only that Pages "files" in fact are directories in the disguise of packages. The problem is that Pages erases the content of the directories at each save. The VCS usually saves control data in the subdirectory (package), but it is all wiped out when you save - something that makes the whole process moot.

For Subversion, there is a script available to solve it.

SVK is also said to handle Pages' directory structure.

Apart from that, a solution is to store the files as zip files - something which of course is not very convenient.

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.

How do I type characters from foreign languages?

For some simple accents and variants of the basic Latin alphabet it is very easy. The steps below will tell you how to see which characters are easy to type with your keyboard.

1. Activate the Keyboard Viewer. (System Preferences > International > Input Menu. Check the checkbox before Keyboard Viewer.)

2. In the flag menu in the upper right corner of the screen, choose Show Keyboard Viewer .



The Keyboard Viewer shows what character will be printed when you use a specific key combination.

3. Hold down a modifier key, like "alt" (⌥).



All accents that are available using "alt" with that keyboard layout are highlighted in orange. In the picture above, I am using U.S. Extended as keyboard layout, but you may have another one.

4. Now press one of the keys that were highlighted in orange, like "e" (acute accent ´ in the picture).



You now see all characters that take an acute accent with this keyboard layout. To type for example á, you would consequently first hold down ⌥ at the same time as you type e, and then press the a-key.


Chances are the characters you want are available with your standard keyboard. Following the steps above you can tell if that is the case.

To learn more about which languages and language features are supported, go to this page.

For instructions for most languages of the world, see the excellent page Unleash Your Multilingual Mac.

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.

Which fonts are included with iWork '09?

Unless you already have them installed, iWork '09 and iWork '08 will install the following fonts on your system:

• Academy Engraved LET
• Bank Gothic
• Blackmoor LET
• BlairMdITC TT-Medium
• Bodoni Ornaments ITC TT
• Bodoni SvtyTwo ITC TT
• Bodoni SvtyTwo OS ITC TT
• Bodoni SvtyTwo SC ITC TT
• Bordeaux Roman Bold LET
• Bradley Hand ITC TT-Bold
• Capitals
• Jazz LET
• Mona Lisa Solid ITC TT
• Palatino
• Party LET
• PortagoITC TT
• Princetown LET
• Santa Fe LET
• Savoye LET
• SchoolHouse Cursive B
• SchoolHouse Printed A
• Snell Roundhand
• Stone Sans ITC TT
• Synchro LET
• Type Embellishmnt One LET

The abbreviations here stand for:

• ITC - International Typeface Corporation
• LET - Letraset
• MD - Medium
• OS - Old Style (used for the kind of figures that sometimes go below the baseline)
• SC - Small Capitals
• SvtyTwo - 72. The Bodoni 72 fonts are designed after Giambattista Bodoni’s 72-point “Papale” font.
• TT - TrueType. Also see Apple's Developer Connection.

Note: Apple's website has lists of the fonts that come installed with Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) and Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)

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.

Does Exact Line spacing work?

The problem described below applies to Pages '08 and earlier. It is fixed in Pages '09.

Unfortunately this means that the layout of a document can change between the two versions, if you used fonts that did not work properly before.

The text below was written for Pages '08:


Sometimes.

You activate Exact Line spacing for a text in the Inspector > Text > Spacing > Line, where you choose "Exactly" instead of the default "Single".

Once you have selected it, a line is supposed to stick to the same height regardless of which font is used. Unfortunately, it does not work on all fonts in Pages 3.0 with Mac OS X 10.4.10. It is not fixed with Mac OS X 10.5 either.

In the image, the black text is Helvetica, Regular, 12. The red text uses the Zapfino font. As line spacing is set to exact, the rest of the text flows correctly with the same spacing, even though the Zapfino font is taller than the surrounding text.

The blue text is set to Adobe Caslon Pro. As the exact line spacing does not work with this font, there is a white additional space that breaks the paragraph in two parts.

It seems OpenType fonts never work with exact line spacing. Many other fonts fail as well, but many work. You just have to try it out, to see if it works for your favourite fonts.

What is new in Pages 3.0?

• Import (but not export) of Microsoft Office 2007 .docx files.
• Change Tracking.
  
• Instant Alpha (to easily add transparency to pictures).
  
• Harddisk requirement down from 750 MB to 260 MB
• >100 new functions available in table formulas.
• HTML export removed and replaced by "Send to iWeb" functionality.
  
• Fixed auto-correction so "may" does not automatically become "May".
• Automatic "Proofreading".
• Word count for part of the text.
• Possibility to remove headers and footers completely.
• Visual connection lines between linked text boxes. (Can be switched off with Format > Text Box > Hide Connection Lines.)
• Split between "Word Processing" and "Layout" templates.
• Character and paragraph background colour.
• Paragraph borders
• Text to table and table to text conversions.
• Hotkeys to styles
  

This list is not exhaustive of course. Other people will notice other things and consider other things more important than some in the list above. However, I think the list covers all major changes.

Update: Somewhat updated after the first comment below. It contains even more new things, so feel free to read it.

Pages 3.0 is here

Pages 3.0 is here. A 470 Megabyte trial version can be downloaded here.

It contains plenty of new features compared to Pages 2.0, but a lot of the problems from previous releases remain. This FAQ is updated for Pages 3.0.

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.

How do I change the background of a page?

You cannot change the background colour of a page in Pages 3.0 or earlier. Neither can you set a texture or picture background.

If you want to change the background for the entire page, the work around is to follow the following steps

1. Insert a rectangle that covers the entire page.
2. In the Inspector, set the rectangle's Object Placement to "Fixed on Page".
3. Uncheck "Object causes wrap".
4. Go to the menu Arrange and Send to Back for the rectangle.

If you are happy with a different background colour for just part of the page you can try the following options:

• In the Font palette (⌘-T), set the background colour of the paragraph with the document icon. It does not change the colour for the whole page, and you cannot limit it to just part of a paragraph.
• Type using text boxes. You can set the background colour and background images using the Inspector.

Which formulas does Pages support?

The best source for that information is the free iWork '09 Formulas and Functions User Guide.

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".