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.

How do I get svg files into Pages?

SVG files are "images" which can be resized without losing any information. They can be created by programs like OpenOffice (the drawing module), Inkscape or Adobe Illustrator.

Often the program that created them can also save to PDF, which Pages handles directly, and that is then an easier solution.

However, there is a way to import black and white SVG files to Pages with the help of some other programs. It it may be cumbersome, the first time you set it up, and you will have to type commands in the Terminal, but it does work.

1. Download the program svg2key and follow the corresponding instructions at http://mcb.berkeley.edu/labs/zusman/dave/svg2key/ .
2. Run the program on the SVG you want to import to Pages.
3. You will get a Keynote file. Open it in Keynote.
4. Copy the content and paste it into Pages.

(Images are usually stored inside the Pages file "package" as separate objects. However SVG objects are stored inside the index.xml file in the package, just like "shapes", text and style information. As far as I can tell, they appear within the tags SFDBezierPathSource.)

Which are my preferences?

If you have Pages running fine for one user on one computer, but you have problems on another, it is possible that the preferences are corrupted.

The quickest and dirtiest way to check this is to delete the preference file -homedirectory-/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iWork.Pages.

However, if you want to check for the exact difference in preferences between the two files you can follow the following steps.

1. Launch the Terminal (Application > Utilities > Terminal).
2. Type the command defaults read com.apple.iWork.Pages |less
3. Hit enter.

You will now get a list of all preferences set for Pages for the active user. It will look something like this:

{
"AppleNavServices:PutFile:0:Disclosure" = <01>;
"AppleNavServices:PutFile:0:HomeDirectoryPath" = "file://~/Desktop/";
"AppleNavServices:PutFile:0:Path" = "file://localhost/Users/Magnus/Desktop/";
"AppleNavServices:PutFile:0:Position" = <01b201ba>;
and so on...

To move to the next page, press space. To move up one page, type b. To get more information about navigating around, press h. To leave the display to be able to type another command, type q.


Using the command defaults you can also change individual values, if needed.

Warning! When you change those values by hand, you may make things worse than they were before, unless you are careful. Make sure you know what you are doing. You can try the commands out in a test account, before you change things in the main account, if you are unsure.

Let's say that you are interested in the following preference:

MediaBrowserVisibility = 0;

You realise that means that the Media Browser is invisible in Pages. (It actually means that it is invisible by default, when Pages starts.) To change it to visible, you type the following text. The full line may not display well in your browser, but you can copy the line. When you paste it in Terminal, it will paste the full line.

defaults write com.apple.iWork.Pages MediaBrowserVisibility 1

Next time you open Pages the Media Browser will be visible.

defaults write com.apple.iWork.Pages MediaBrowserVisibility 0

And it will be invisible next time you open Pages.

Remember that you will have to close Pages and reopen it for it to take the changed values into account.

Using Aperture with Pages

There are some hints how to use Aperture with Pages at the blog Photo Phindings.

index.xml.gz and corruption

Under certain non-identified circumstances the file index.xml.gz can be corrupted. According to posts in Apple's discussion forums by Yvan Koenig, who usually knows what he is talking about, the corruption can be avoided by using Save As... instead of Save. The conclusion is to make frequent Save As... actions as backups, if you work on important large documents.

To rescue some information from a corrupted document, you can right click (ctrl-click) on the corrupted document and choose "Show package content" and look for a file called index.xml or index-new.xml. Copy the xml file to the desktop (for example) and open it with TextEdit. The content does not look nice, but text you have entered is partly readable.

If you only have a file called index-new.xml you can try the following steps:

1. Copy the entire corrupted document, so you have a backup just in case.
2. Rename the file index-new.xml to index.xml (with or without gz depending on the original).
3. Open the file in Pages.

If you are lucky that works.

TextEdit and Styles

In case you use TextEdit as well as Pages, you will have noticed that TextEdit has an unusual and sometimes buggy way of handling styles.

If you click on the "Styles" control in TextEdit's toolbar, you will at first only see Favorite Styles.



A Favorite Style can be used in any TextEdit document for this user on this computer, but nowhere else. It is stored in the hidden file .GlobalPreferences.plist.

If you click on "Other...", you will get to a window where you can see the Document Styles. In contrast to almost all other programs, a Document Style in TextEdit has no customisable name.



It just contains some sample text ("ONE" in the picture above), which has a particular format. All formats used in the document appear as you click the arrows back and forth.

To create a Favorite Style from the current format, click on the button "Add To Favorites" and give it a name, and choose if you want the font and ruler information to be part of the style.

To delete a Favorite Style, click on the radio button Favorite Styles, select the style you want to delete and click on Remove From Favorites.



If you click on Select, you can choose to select where the style is used, based on different criteria.



You click on Apply, the active style is applied to the currently selected text.

Done in the Style window just closes the window.

If you do not have the Ruler active, you can still use Styles with the menus: Format > Font > Style

There is no easy way to edit an existing Favorite Style. The steps are:

1. Apply the style to some text.
2. Modify the text to the new format you want.
3. Add the new format as a new Favorite Style with the same name as the old style.
4. Accept the warning that you are replacing an existing style.

There is no way of telling which style is applied to a particular piece of text. That information is not stored and not displayed.

Personally, I think it is questionable if TextEdit's styles are better than no styles at all. It is clear that there has been some development effort, but the design does not seem to have gone through any usability tests. Still, if they fulfill any of your particular needs, there is of course no harm in using them.

i

Several languages, like Catalan, Croatian, Italian and most Scandinavian languages have a word that consists of the single letter "i".

The problem is that if you launch Pages 3.0 or Pages 4.0 in English and have switched on Fix Capitalization in the preferences, then the word "i" will automatically become "I", even if you type in another language than English. The Danish (and Norwegian and Swedish) phrase "gå i land" will become "gå I land".

The silly thing is that Pages assumes that you want the capitalisation rules of the language you run the software in - not the language you set in Inspector > Text > more.

There are a few solutions here.

• Switch Fix Capitalization off.
• Launch Pages in a non-English language, like French, Italian or German. (Drag the language to the top in System Preferences > International > Languages, before you launch Pages.)
• Hack. This is one of those things that can go seriously wrong unless you are careful, but if you succeed things will work fine:

1. Control-click on the application Pages, and choose "Show Package Contents".
2. Go to /Contents /Frameworks /SFWordProcessing.framework /Versions /A /Resources /English.lproj.
3. Make a copy of AutoCorrect.plist as a backup and put it for example on the Desktop, in case things go wrong.
4. Open the file AutoCorrect.plist with for example TextEdit. You will find two lines with the following text somewhere in the file under capitalizationDictionary: <key>i</key> <string>I</string>
   
5. Remove that text. Save the file.
6. Relaunch Pages.

The inconvenience here is that even if you type in English, it no longer will correct i to I.

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.

Print shops and embedded fonts

With some print shops you may get an error back saying something like "This file was created with Mac OS X 10.4.11 Quartz PDFContext / Pages. We cannot print files created with this application."

Mac OS X embeds several subsets of the same font, just like many other applications. However, for some reason some printers (like Lulu) are not able to handle the way Mac OS X does it.

A solution that in some cases works is to create the PDF using Print > PDF > Print to PDF-X. In contrast to a standard PDF, which can be used for many purposes, a PDF-X file is dedicated to facilitate printing.

You can find some more information at the following sites:

• http://athleticaid.com/yaquinapress/PDF-FAQ.html#Mac_PDF_issues
• http://www.lulu.com/en/help/index.php?fSymbol=reasons_files_dont_print
• http://www.prepressure.com/pdf/basics/osx_quartz
• http://www.lulu.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=25428

How do I type Wingdings in Pages?

Wingdings and Webdings are fonts with small images instead of the letters. My personal recommendation is that you do not use them, even if you have the fonts. This is why:

Every document you type will be read by someone - either by someone else or by yourself in a few minutes, days or years. A document you type with Latin letters or any standard unicode letters is likely to be legible by anyone with the right software - today and in the future. But Wingdings is not standard unicode.

Now, let's assume that you want to show the yin-and-yang symbol to a reader.


You know that it is part of the Wingdings font, so you decide to get the symbol there.

So what you can do is to activate the Keyboard Viewer. Then select Wingdings from the menu in the bottom left corner and then select Wingdings as font in Pages and start typing.


However, when you send this Pages document to another computer user, it is very possible that he will not have the Wingdings font, so the character will not display. What is displayed is just "[" because that is the character that Wingdings uses to display the yin-yang symbol.

And the same thing can happen to you. When you change the paragraph style in this document, the symbol will become "[". If you copy the text to another application, it will become "[". If you export it to RTF and then open it in TextEdit, it will become "[". It is basically a very unstable character - just like all other characters in Wingdings, Webdings and Monotype Sorts.

TextEdit does not even allow you to type the character, and that is probably a wise choice. You can insert it from the Character Palette to TextEdit. You find it in the Character Palette with the View PIFonts, Font: Wingdings-Regular. However, what is inserted is the unicode F05B which is in the Private Area. The Private Area means that it can be used by anyone for anything, so depending on the available font, it can appear as completely different characters.


As you do not know which font the reader will have available, you will not know what the document will look like to him. That's why it usually is best to avoid Wingdings fonts altogether.

There are perhaps cases where you need to use them, but try to make sure you have a normal picture as a backup - just in case. You can also use Wingdings to create PDF files, as PDFs usually embed the font.

How do I import and export text files in different encodings?

Pages does not pretend to be a text editor. If you want to edit text files, you are much better off using TextEdit or other programs.

When you Export a text file from Pages, it usually uses either Western (Mac OS Roman) or unicode UTF16 as encoding. You cannot choose which encoding you want, and you cannot for sure tell what encoding it was, unless you verify in some other program like TextWrangler.

When you import text files, Pages can usually open UTF16 without any problem and usually also Western (Mac OS Roman). Pages is unable to open the common UTF8 format.

The workaround is to always use TextEdit or another program for text files. You can then copy the content to Pages - if you want to.

How do I create my own Color Palette?

Sometimes you may want to use a limited number of colours for a document. Let's for example say that you want certain words in blue. If you use the standard Color Wheel in the color window (View > Show Colors), you may end up with slightly different shades of blue, depending on where you click.


To be sure that you always select the same colour, you can drag colours from the rectangle next to the magnifying glass to the strip at the bottom of the window.



The strip contains 15 squares by default, and that should be more than enough for most people. However, if you need more, you can drag the the dot below to make room for more squares.



You may need several sets of colours. Let's for example say that you want one particular set of three colours in one document but another set of three colours in another document. You can handle that as well in the Color window, using the third tab, called "Color Palettes".



Here you can choose between a few pre-defined palettes, like Apple, Web Safe Colors or Developer, but you can also create your own ones, clicking on the wheel, and choosing "New".



You can of course rename both the colours and the colour palettes to whatever names you like.




So, how do you select colours for your palettes? You can do this in (at least) two ways.

One is to click on the magnifying glass and then click on an area of the screen that has a colour you want to capture.



The other method is to select a colour using one of the other icons on the top. Then go back to the "Color palettes" icon.

After you have selected a colour, you drag it into the empty area of your palette or click on the + button. That's it. You do not even have to save, as the colour palette has auto-save (in contrast to Pages documents).

What are the most frequent of the frequent questions?

It is very difficult to tell what the most frequently asked questions are about Pages. Looking at Apples Discussion forums one can get one impression. Looking at this blog a different one.

This is a graph of the most common keyword categories that have led people to this blog this February 2008:



The most common keyword is about a missing function: autosave. One out of eight people who find this site with a search engine come here because they miss an autosave function.

The next keyword is about possibilities: applescript. That is actually good news - people want to extend and adapt the program for their own needs.

The following point, however, is again about a missing function: wordart. It may be questionable if it would make sense to include a word art module in Pages, but it is not questionable if it is an often wished for function.

The next one is again about missing functionality, but it is not missing in Pages itself. A lot of people ask for means to read Pages files on Windows or on Macs, where Pages is not installed. Most often, what they dream of is a viewer.

The following three points, rotations (of graphics, tables, text), attachments to mails and a mean to set a default font, are all available, but the user interfaces of Pages and Mac OS X are not intuitive enough for everyone to find the functions.

The last one in the diagram is password protection, something many programs offer from within the program itself. When it comes to iWork, however, password protection has to take place in an external program, Disk Utility.

There are plenty of other searches that lead to this blog - about fonts, typography, colour schemes, Japanese features, and so on.

My own wish would be that Pages one day will be so intuitive and powerful that this kind of blog has no purpose any more. However, that does not seem to happen any time soon.

Why can't I Copy a Character Style?

Sometimes the menu item Format > Copy Character Style is greyed out, even though you know you have changed something in the formatting.

The most likely reason is that you changed formatting for the paragraph, but not for the character - at least not directly.

Here the paragraph is selected:
Note the character at the end of the word.

Here just a word is selected:
Change formatting for the paragraph, and the Character Style is not updated. Change formatting for a word or individual characters, and the Character Style is updated and can be copied.

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.