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.

How does Pages handle captions?

If you want a caption under a picture or table, you can create a text box under the picture and group the two items together. That will make sure that they stay together when text and layout objects move around.

If you have a lot of pictures with captions, you may want to create a dedicated Style to apply to the text boxes, so the layout is harmonised throughout the document.

Unfortunately there is no function to get automatically numbered captions. Neither can you have an automatically generated Table listing all images or tables.

How does Pages handle Bibliographies?

There used to be some fairly big limitations in Pages' own handling of references, citations and bibliographies. With Pages '09, Apple supports Endnote. I currently (6 January 2009) do not know how well that integration works.

The following text was written for earlier versions of Pages.

If you choose to use Endnotes that go at the end of a document, you cannot use page Footnotes or Section Endnotes in the same document. If you want to add text after the list of Endnotes, you are better off using Section Endnotes to start with. Use one section for the whole document, until the "end notes" section, and then add another section after that with the last bits of the document.

If you want to use the same reference several times using cross references with footnotes, you will have problems. Microsoft Word handles that better.

There is no support for multiple tables of contents. Neither is there an integrated Bibliography database, as there is in NeoOffice/OpenOffice.

Pages does not integrate elegantly with dedicated reference software like Thomson ResearchSoft's EndNote or Sonny Software's Bookends or Reference Miner. That kind of software tends to integrate better with Microsoft Word or Mellel. It is sometimes able to scan RTF files - which you can produce from Pages, provided the document does not contain pictues.

Thomson ResearchSoft state on their Mac page that they are unable to integrate their Cite While You Write functionality into Pages 3.0, as Apple does not support that kind of integration.

CiteInPages but it claims to integrate with BibDesk after some configuration.

Third Street Software's Sente does have bibliography support for Pages.

Why cannot a table cell span two pages?

I have no idea why Apple chose to prevent table cells from spanning two pages, but that's the way things are in Pages 3.0 and earlier.

This may not be a big problem if you are translating Petrarca's sonnets, and want the left column to contain the original text and the right one the translation. Each sonnet is so short that you probably can adjust the text so no split is needed between pages.



However, if you try the same trick with Beowulf, you will inevitably end up having to split chapters over page breaks. Not only is the end of the text simply cut off - there is an ugly trace of letters cut in half.



One solution is to use text boxes. Have one set of text boxes on the left for the original and link them over the page breaks. Have a parallel set of text boxes on the right for the translation, and split them in the same way.

The case of the disappearing Character palette

The Character palette and the Keyboard Viewer sometimes do not come up when you want to. You can try to click on its menu item in both the Edit menu and the Flag menu, and it remains hidden.

The reason is that some cache files are corrupted.

The solution is to delete the following files from /System/Library/Caches:

• com.apple.IntlDataCache.le
• com.apple.IntlDataCache.le.kbdx
• com.apple.IntlDataCache.le.sbdl
• com.apple.IntlDataCache.le.tecx

And then restart.

After that, it should be no problem accessing the Character palette from the Edit menu, in applications that support it, like Pages, or from the flag menu.

If it does not appear in the flag menu, go to System Preferences > International > Keyboards and activate it.

Update 21 January 2008: Apple today posted a very similar solution here.

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.

How do I modify shapes in Pages?

After you have added a drawing object in Pages there are a number of modifications you can do, but they are not always obvious from the user interface. This blog goes through a couple of examples of what can be done - not using the inspector even once.

Start with a simple square.


Go to Format > Shape > Make Editable.


The square is now editable and gets four red dots in the corner, which you can drag around. From now on, if you lose the red dots, the easiest way to get them back, is to click on the square twice slowly (do not double-click). As it already is editable, you no longer have to go to the menu.

First we want to create a trapezoid. Click in the upper left corner to select it. It turns white. Shift-click in the upper right corner to add it to the selection. Drag either of the two white corners, and the whole upper line moves around.


As you move the dots around, they snap to alignments, just like other shapes in Pages. Below, the upper right corner is right above the lower left corner, as you can see from the blue line that connects the two small circles.


Now we want to make a triangle from the trapezoid, so we need to remove one of the corners. Click in the lower right corner, so only that one is selected, and press delete. The lower right corner disappears, and we are left with the other three - we have a triangle. (To go back to the trapezoid, you could either press command-z or alt-click on a border to add another red circle and then drag it to recreate the previous shape.)


To rotate the triangle, command-click on a corner and drag it. A small window shows how many degrees you rotate the image. If you hold down shift, as you rotate, the shape will only rotate to 45°, 90°, 135°, 180° and so on.



Now double click on one of the corners. It turns into a Béziers curve. You can drag the two handles to change the shape of the curve. If you want to break the two handles, you can hold down command, as you drag one of them. If you want to join them again, hold down alt when you drag.


To create an open path, go to Objects (in the toolbar) > Shapes and choose the curve shape at the bottom of the list. Click once in the document, and then a second time to create a line. (You could click several time to create more lines or click-drag to create curves, but that's not what we want to do right now.) Press esc to finalise the line.


Now alt-click on the line to create a new red circle. Double click on the new circle to make it a Bézier curve.


Drag the newly created circle and adjust the curve. Unfortunately it is difficult to get a perfect circle segment, but you can get an approximation that may be good enough for some uses. Adding more points can improve the approximation.



For a video on how to create a half-circle in an even easier way, check this video by Kyn Drake.

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 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.

How do I change the shape of the Font palette?

The Font palette or Font panel, that little friendly window that comes up when you press ⌘-T, has a surprising number of possible shapes. Some you can get by simply resizing the window from the lower right corner.

Drag up left:


Drag up right:


Drag down left:


Drag down right:


And then access the wheel menu, where you can show "Preview" and "Effects":

With Preview:


With Preview and Effects buttons:


You can also mix them to some unusual but perhaps useful combinations, like Preview in a really small window.

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.

How do I see what my fonts look like?

From Pages '09, you can see WYSIWYG font previews in the Format Bar font menu. Just make sure that you have the preferences right: Pages > Preferences > Show font preview in Format Bar font menu. To switch between WYSIWYG and standard font names, hold down the alt-key, as you click on the menu.

In previous versions this was not possible, but there were some other options that worked fairly well - some would say better.

Use the Font palette header

Follow these steps:

1. Display the Font palette using ⌘-T or the menu Format > Fonts > Show Fonts.
2. Click on the wheel in the lower left corner and choose "Show Preview".
   

You will get a preview of the currently highlighted font.

To easily scroll between the fonts, first put your cursor in the search field. This will take the focus away from your main document. Then highlight a font and scroll up and down with the arrow keys.

Use the Font palette Favorites


Select the collection "Favorites". It lists the latest font families you used, and it shows them in the last used Typeface and Size.

Use an Apple Script

Follow these steps:

1. In the Finder, go to Applications and open Font Book.
2. In Font Book, highlight all fonts (or the ones you are curious about).
3. In the Finder, go to Applications > AppleScript > Example Scripts > Font Book and double click on Create Font Sample.scpt. It will open in Script Editor.
4. In Script Editor click on "Run".
5. Wait.

After some time, you will have a document in TextEdit that contains samples of all your Typefaces in all your fonts. Save it for future reference.

Use Font Book

Font Book is an important tool for at least two purposes. One - display what your fonts look like. Two - organise your fonts.

The main reason Apple has not included WYSIWYG font displays in Pages or the Font Palette is that it would be next to impossible with all the fonts we have today. You would have to scroll for ever - up and down, looking for a font that fits your needs. You would forget the name of one you saw and you would have to start over again.

WYSIWYG font menus worked on the first Macs, when the average user had no more than six fonts, but today the average user has several hundreds.

If you are serious about finding the most perfect font in this hay stack, use Font Book collections. It does not cost anything, and they are easy to remove, when no longer needed.

Create a collection for for example sans serif fonts, another for good body text fonts, another for Chinese fonts, and so on. It will be much easier to compare Monaco and Andale Mono, if they are in the same small collection, than if you have to scroll 150 fonts to get from one to the other. For more hints how to create collections, check this post.

Which of Pages' methods to create PDF files should I use?

If you prioritize a small file, use Share > Export > PDF (Good) or PDF (Better). "Good" means roughly 72 dpi for the embedded images. "Better" means roughly 150 dpi. Images will lose quality, but it should be acceptable for display on a computer screen.

If you prioritize high quality graphics, use Print > PDF > Save to PDF or Share > Export > PDF (Best). These two methods seem virtually identical. Graphics included in the document keep the original quality and resolution.

There is no difference between any of the methods for text and inserted shapes. They are vector graphics and keep their infinite resolution.

If you will send the PDF off for professional printing you can try one of two options.

• Print to PDF/X. This is supposed to produce a file with colour profiles that a printer can handle correctly. See further information.
• Print to PostScript and then convert the postscript file to PDF - preferably using Adobe Acrobat. In some (or all?) cases this produces a file that is easier to colour separate. See further information.

(Note: The "Share" menu mentioned above was called "File" before Pages '09.)

For information about some of the features that Pages supports in PDF files, see this post.


On the left a 300% view of a picture scaled to fit one square inch in Pages. In the middle, the same Pages file exported as "Good" PDF. The loss of quality is clearly visible at 300% magnification. To the right is the result of a "Preflight" in Adobe Acrobat. The image dimensions are 73/73 pixels.

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.