Pages and iCloud - an Unlikely Winner against Google Drive and Skydrive

Even though I have assembled quite a lot of information, questions and quirks about Apples word processor Pages, it is not a program I feel particularly connected with. It is a word processor from Apple. It does what it should do - some of the time. It does some things elegantly and many things not at all. It still after eight years has some pretty big limitations, like poor support for Arabic and Hebrew.

Every now and then I try to find a better tool, and often I find myself using MS Word or TextEdit for local files.

As time has gone on, more and more people talk about the cloud, and one would think that the big software giants of today had figured out how to make it work properly. I decided to compare Microsoft Skydrive, Google Drive and iCloud, thinking that anyone of them probably will be fine for me. It turned out that none of them has made the cloud work properly yet, but the one with least limitations was Apple's Pages.

What I want seems simple enough. I want to edit text. Not pictures. Not fancy layout. Not tables or embedded movies. I do not need collaboration, revisions, comments or versions. Just text. I want to edit the text:

• on a Mac.
• on a Windows PC.
• on a tablet.
• on a phone.
• in a browser.
• off line.
• on line with synchronisation with a cloud.

Skydrive

Microsoft Skydrive is something that is so close but not at all there. To use Skydrive on a Mac, you download an application called Skydrive from Microsoft. It is free. You also buy MS Office, which is not at all free. To use Skydrive to edit texts on your Android or iOS phone, you need to sign up to Microsoft Office 365, which costs $10 a month. On the paper, Office 365 is a good deal. You get the latest version of Office for 5 computers, Macs or PCs, and you can use it with your phone. However, if you already have MS Office, $10 a month is quite expensive for something Apple and Google give you for free. I heard that one can edit Office files without problems on a Windows phone, but that is not the phone I have.

And then there are the bugs.

I got some problems with Skydrive and followed a link in Skydrive for Mac, which recommended me to download Skydrive for PC to my Mac. Skydrive for PC is not compatible with Windows XP, so it would not work even on my Windows machine, and it is of course even less compatible with Mac OS X. I found a link to Skydrive for Mac and reinstalled the latest version. The program then hang itself in an infinite loop, where it asked me if I wanted to restart it over and over again. Even restarting my Mac did not help. When I finally managed to clean up the installation enough to make Skydrive start, it refused to synchronise, which is its main purpose. It showed the sync symbol for five minutes, proudly explaining that it was uploading a 36k document. Once it was done, I verified the synchronisation, and it had failed.

The two main problems with Skydrive are:

1. It is pricy.

2. It is unusable.

But I give it that the web interface to edit documents is decent and it plays reasonably well with a local copy of Word, if you are connected to the internet.

Google Drive

Google Drive, which used to be called Google Docs was one of the first major cloud office suits. It works well on line, it is a good way to share a document between several connected devices.

My problem with Google Drive is off line editing. I can edit documents using my iPhone when it is connected, but when I am abroad without roaming, when I am in an airplane, or when I have not paid my internet provider fee, I am stuck. I can read documents off line, but I cannot edit them.

Using Google Drive for PC or Mac is slightly better. One can edit documents when one is not connected. One can even create new ones. However, one cannot export them to other formats when one is off line, so if you want to make a modification using some feature in MS Word, you have to first find an internet connection.

iCloud

A few years ago, I would not have bet much on Pages being a major part of my text editing life, and I would not have bet on Apple being able to do anything properly in the cloud.

However, it turns out that Pages for iOS and Pages for Mac both save files locally and sync them with iCloud. I can create a document on my disconnected iPad, connect my iPad and sync and update the document on my iPhone and finish it on my Mac when I get home. I can even use a browser and update it on a PC (but without any local storage). That's basically all I need.

Conclusion

My very personal conclusion which applies to me, is that iCloud wins. If I had to limit myself to one cloud, it would be iCloud. If I can use two clouds, I would use iCloud and Google Drive. If I can use three, I would use iCloud and Google Drive and nothing more.

That is the state of today. I do not necessarily recommend you to use iCloud, because your needs may be different from mine. Regardless of what anyone uses today, I hope Google, Apple and Microsoft will all improve in the future. Even Skydrive has potential if Microsoft just decides to fix its bugs and release it properly to non-Windows users.

That is my second wish. That iCloud shall work fine on Android and Windows and Linux. That Skydrive shall work on Android and iOS and that Google Drive will get decent support for off line editing on all platforms.

Once that is done, perhaps the different systems can start working with each other instead of isolated in their own little clouds up in the blue.

Pages - Save As...

In most applications, you can save an open file under a new file name with File > Save as... or shift-command-S.

In recent versions of Pages and TextEdit, the command is File > Duplicate > File (again!) > Save.

There is no keyboard shortcut for this, unless you customise your keyboard shortcuts in System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > Application Shortcuts.

This admittedly makes Save as... more cumbersome to use, but it is a (somewhat) logical consequence of the Autosave feature of Pages, which is so automatic that you never should have to save a file again. Almost.

Can Pages create epub files?

Yes! From version 9.0.4 released in August 2010.

With the advent of iBook and the iPad, the epub file format is getting more useful, and luckily Apple released the functionality. This is one of the few major points where Pages is distinctly superior to MS Word.

Instructions, recommendation (and limitations) can be found at Apple's support site.

How do I batch transfer several Pages documents from my iPad or iPhone?

The easiest way seems to be to use iCloud. Activate it on the iPad with Settings > iCloud > Documents & Data. This will automatically send all your documents to Apple, and you can then download them on your Mac.

On the Mac or PC:

1. Go to http://www.icloud.com. 
2. Sign in with your Apple ID.
3. Click on iWork.
4. Command-click (ctrl-click) on all the documents you want to download.
5. Do NOT click on any of the many "Download" buttons.
6. Click on the wheel in the upper right corner and select "Download document..." 

Pages for iPad cannot create usable PDF files

Some PDF files from Pages for iPad are distorted or unreadable when opened in Adobe Reader. They display much better in Preview, but as Windows users do not have Preview, this is not much of consolation. You can follow this thread to see other people having the same problem. If Apple releases a fix, the thread is likely to be updated by happy users.

There seem to be some dependency on which fonts are used. Trying out most of the fonts installed on my iPad, hardly anyone displayed correctly in Adobe Reader. However, all except Heiti and Zapfino were readable. Heiti and Zapfino displayed as dots: ••••


One font actually displayed as it should, and that was Apple Gothic. It is a mystery why that one of all fonts worked.

Most other fonts displayed as Adobe Sans MM. To get a consistent layout, you can try using Arial or Helvetica in Pages for iPad, as they also are sans serif fonts. You can also try Apple Gothic.

It is nevertheless good to validate the file in Adobe Reader. The final display may depend on your system or the layout of the document.


A list of embedded fonts in Adobe Reader. File > Properties > Fonts.

Pages stuck on iPad

If you start Pages on an iPad, you may get stuck without any controls and no obvious way out.

If you are in landscape mode, the simple trick is to rotate the iPad 90 degrees to portrait mode, and the controls will appear.

For other issues see: Apple's support,

A tempting alternative - Lotus Symphony for Mac OS X?

I just realised that there was another office suit out there apart from the "obvious" ones, iWork, MS Office and OpenOffice/NeoOffice.

IBM has their own version of OpenOffice, called Lotus Symphony. It is free, as in "it costs no money", but unfortunately it costs time and pain.

I gave it just a few minutes, and found a rather nice looking UI and loads of bugs.


Just finding the installation file on their web site took for ever, and once it had downloaded the 212 Megabyte installation file, it managed to lock up Firefox, so I had to kill the browser.

The installation procedure suggests you associate open document files to Lotus Symphony. I did not do that, and Symphony decided not to tell the OS that it can open the files it creates (open document .odt for word processing). In other words, when I double click a file created by Symphony, it will open in OpenOffice or TextEdit. Not even right-click and "Open with..." works. You have to open the file from inside Symphony itself.

Symphony pretends to support Asiatic languages, but there are so many problems with both input and vertical script, that I would really advice against it.

Symphony actually has a decent amount of Clipart and a "Fontwork" module which is similar to MS Office's Wordart, even though Symphony's version is less flexible.

One reason to at least download Lotus Symphony, is if you want to grab some of the Clipart. You can probably find as good clipart elsewhere on the net, but here is to extract it from an installed version of Lotus Symphony, if that is what you want:

1. Open Applications > Utilities > Terminal.
2. Type: /Applications/Symphony.app/Contents/MacOS/shared/eclipse/plugins/com.ibm.productivity.tools.gallery.common (Do not press enter!)
3. Press the tab key. This will expand the directory to its full name.
4. Type open . (Yes. With the space and the dot.)
5. Press enter. You will get a new Finder window, where you can browse for the clipart. The files are in wmf format, which can be opened by a number of applications, like OpenOffice, Adobe Illustrator, gimp, WMF Viewer for Mac, GraphicConverter and so on, but unfortunately not by Pages or Preview directly.

IBM Lotus Symphony 1.3 definitely has some potential, but they have a long, long way to go with bug fixes, before it can be considered a serious alternative to MS Office or OpenOffice.

If you are hesitating between iWork and MS Office or OpenOffice/NeoOffice, there is currently hardly any good reason to include Lotus Symphony as a fourth option.

How do I save as Word document?

Pages is not a Word replacement. If you want a product that saves Word documents, you are better off with MS Word (which costs more) or NeoOffice/OpenOffice (which cost nothing).

Pages can export to Word's doc format, but it can be annoying to always have to select and overwrite the document you already have with a new version every time you change. Besides the export is far from perfect.

If you are set on using Pages, and nothing but Pages to edit your Word documents there is a hack, which is described at leefindlow.com. That site describes very well how to do it, so I will just add a short summary here for the record.

Please, remember that Apple never intended us to do this, and anything you do slightly wrong may mess up Pages for you. Only follow the following steps if you know exactly what you are doing.

1. Right-click (or ctrl-click) on the application icon for Pages and select "Show Package Contents" from the pop-up menu.
2. Find the file Contents/info.plist. (You may want to make a backup copy of it, in case you mess up in the following steps.)
3. Open the file in an editor like Property List Editor. If you are comfortable with XML, you can also use a text editor like TextEdit or TextWrangler.
4. Look in CFBundleDocumentTypes/Document types. There you will find a list of different Document types (CFBundleTypeName).
5. Find the document type Microsoft Word document.
6. Check its associated Role (CFBundleTypeRole). By default it is set to Viewer.
7. Change the Role to Editor.
8. Find the document type Microsoft Word 97 - 2004 document.
9. Check its associated Role (CFBundleTypeRole). By default it is set to Viewer.
10. Change the Role to Editor.
11. Save the file info.plist.

From now on, when you open a Word document in Pages 3 or 4, it will be able to save the file when you simply press cmd-S.

How do I make an organisation chart or a flow chart in Pages?

One of the crucial things in making a chart is to have connector points between boxes and other objects, so the links can stay the same, even if you move the objects around.



The connector points of Pages are a little limited, but they exist.

1. Create two or more shapes. (For example: Insert > Shape > Rectangle.)
2. Make sure the shapes are floating in the Inspector > Wrap (third icon) > Floating (doesn't move with the text.
   
3. Highlight two shapes.
4. Go to Insert > Connection Line.

You can now move the objects around in Pages to fit the page layout. You can also drag the middle of the connector line to bend it. Or change line type, shadow, colour, and so on.


(Updated for Pages 9.0. Thanks for the comments pointing out that one no longer has to create the chart in Keynote!)

How do I find paragraph marks and tabs in Pages?

If you want to search for paragraph marks, tabs or other special characters in Pages, you can do that in the search dialogue (Edit > Find > Find...) using the Insert... drop down.


If you prefer to use Applescript to find this kind of items, you can use the special keywords space, tab, return, linefeed and quote, for example like this:

tell application "Pages"
 repeat with achar in characters of body text of front document
  if contents of achar = return then
   display dialog (character offset of achar as integer)
  end if
 end repeat
end tell

Keyboard Shortcuts in Pages

To quickly learn some of the keyboard shortcuts in Pages, the easiest way is to look in the menus. In the menu above, you can for example see that you use command+C to copy.

These are the symbols that are used:

⌘ is the "command" key.
⌥ is the key called "alt" or "option" depending on your keyboard.
⇧ is the shift key.
^ is the ctrl key.

However there are more keyboard shortcuts that are not necessarily available in any of the menus. Also note that they may be slightly different (or even broken) in other languages than English. Here are some examples of working shortcuts for an English keyboard:

Hold the mouse pointer over a word, and press ⌘ ^ D. This will call up a small dictionary window. If you want more information about the word, click on "more".

Type a few letters, and press ⌥ esc to get a list of words beginning with those letters. You can also use F5 for the same function.

To change to the next open Pages window, press ⌘ `.

To change to the next open application, press ⌘ tab.

To copy text or a graphic, highlight it. Then hold down ⌥ at the same time as you drag it to the place where you want to copy it.

You may have noticed that you can drag tabs around in the ruler with your mouse. However, by default they only land at certain positions. To be able to move the tabs around to any position on the ruler, hold down ⌘ at the same time as you drag.

When you try to close a modified document window, you get a dialogue asking if you want to change your changes. The three buttons each have their hidden shortcut: Return saves. Escape closes the dialogue without closing the window. ⌘ D is equivalent to "Don't save" and discards your modifications.

To get super script, like in mc², highlight a character, and press ⇧ ^ ⌘ +. (In the menu, it looks like the shortcut is simply ^⌘+. However, as the + character needs ⇧ to display, you need to add ⇧ as well. To get subscripts , like O₂, you only need to press ^⌘-).

To add an indent level to an item in a list, use ⌘ ]. To remove an indent level for a list item, use ⌘ [.

To add an indent level to an item in an outline, use tab. To remove an indent level for an outline, use ⇧ tab.

Graphics

If you change the size of a shape, you can hold down ⇧ at the same time as you drag its corners to keep the proportions between height and width.

If you want to rotate a shape or image, you can hold down ⌘ and hold the cursor over a resize point of the shape or image, to change the cursor to a rotation tool.

If you want to make sure that a shape or image keeps the same centre point, hold down ⌥ at the same time as you resize.

Some more graphics keyboard combinations are described in this post.

More resources

In Finder, go to Help, and type "shortcut" in the search field, to get generic Mac OS X shortcuts.

In Pages, go to Help, and type "shortcut" in the searchfield, to get Pages shortcuts.

You can find more information about shortcuts in Mac OS X at Apple's support site.

You can find more information about shortcuts in Pages at Apple's support site.

To learn how to customize your own shortcuts in Mac OS X and Pages, go to this page.

How do I unlearn words from the spelling dictionary?

Let's say that you write a text about someone with the incredibly attractive name "Magnus". The name is underlined in Pages as incorrectly spelt, if you type in English. To add the name to your spelling dictionary, you may simply right-click (ctrl-click) on it and select "Learn Spelling" from the menu, and Pages will from now on accept the spelling.

Now, assume that by mistake the word you right-clicked was "Nagnus". To tell Pages that you made a mistake that should be forgotten, you right-click the word and this time select "Unlearn Spelling" from the menu.



This technique applies to TextEdit as well.

In older versions of Apple's software, you could unlearn words from the Spelling dialogue box, but with current versions, the way to go is right-clicking.

PDF/X Problems in Leopard

With Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) some people got problems printing PDF/X files. It seems the people who did not get problems did not print complicated documents.


Problem one - some documents. Certain documents, like the Pages '09 template Word Processing > Reports > Visual Report simply refuses to create any document. You can choose the menu item in the Print dialogue, you can enter a file name, but then you get a message: "Alert Couldn't create PDF/X-3 document."


Problem two - resolution. This limitation was likely here even before Leopard, but it is worth mentioning. PDF/X-3 does not support layers, and that means that the PDF/X-creator has to rasterise vector graphics over pictures, like text over shadows. The problem is that Mac OS X rasterizes to 72 dpi, and that is no way good enough for printing on most modern high resolution printers.

The resolution is defined in a Filter in ColorSync (Applications > Utilities > ColorSync Utility). Go to Filters and check the properties for "Create Generic PDFX-3 Document". The resolution is defined next to the "Flatten Transparency" checkbox. The annoying thing is that the Filter is read only, so we cannot change the resolution.


What we can do, is to create a copy of the original Filter and change the value there. (Do not try to change the values for Trimbox or Bleedbox. I do not know anyone who has made them work.)

Next, is something you should NOT do. The entry in the Print dialogue to print to PDF-X is defined in /Library/PDF Services. Do not be tempted to change any of those entries. You will get a warning message saying: The behavior of this workflow may have changed because of the reasons listed below. The workflow was saved with an older version of the action "Apply Qua... If you try to resave it, you may break it and stand with one less working entry in the Print dialogue.

Instead, to solve the resolution problem, follow the following steps.

Setup

1. Open ColorSync.
2. Go to Filters.
3. Click on the circled triangle next to the filter Create Generic PDFX-3 Document and select the option "Duplicate".
4. Double click on the name of the new filter and change the name, if you want to.
5. Expand the filter elements and change the resolution to 300 and 300. You do not need to save the changes, but you may want to quit ColorSync and reopen it, to make sure that the change has been taken into account.

Usage

1. Open the document you want to make into PDF/X.
2. Print to PDF (standard PDF).
3. Right click or control click on the created PDF file and select Open With > ColorSync Utility from the pop up menu.
4. In the document window in ColorSync select the filter you created above from the list in the bottom left corner of the window.
5. Click on Apply. (The Filter list will be reset to "None" through some quirk, but do not let that scare you.)
6. Select Save or Save As... from the File menu. You will now have a high resolution PDF/X file. Probably.

Warning: The error handling in ColorSync is abysmal. If you have too complicated a file - for example one that would not even allow you create a low resolution PDF/X file from the Print dialogue, then the resulting file may not be compliant with PDF/X even after the ColorSync treatment. The only way I know of verifying this for sure, is to open the file in Adobe Acrobat and do a "preflight".

iWork '09 and Security

The new version of iWork has a few issues with security that previous versions did not have. Note that I have no personal experience of any of the issues below, but I rely entirely on other sources. Please, use your own judgement when you use the information.

A Trojan called iServices.a has spread with an unofficial version of iWork that can be downloaded from other places than Apple.com. According to Intego, 20000 people have already downloaded the Trojan, but that sounds exaggerated. Once the Trojan is installed, it listens for instructions from a remote server. The remote server could for example ask for your personal address book or other private data, which would be sent without your knowledge.

To see if you have the Trojan, go to /System/Library/StartupItems. If there is a folder there called iWorkServices, the Mac is infected.

To remove the Trojan automatically, download this script at MacUpdate.

To remove the Trojan manually:

1. Open the Terminal (Applications > Utilities > Terminal).
2. Type sudo su and enter.
3. Type your account password and enter. (This assumes you are administrator.)
4. Type rm -r /System/Library/StartupItems/iWorkServices and enter.
5. Type rm /private/tmp/.iWorkServices and enter.
6. Type rm /usr/bin/iWorkServices and enter.
7. Type rm -r /Library/Receipts/iWorkServices.pkg and enter.
8. Type killall -9 iWorkServices and enter.

More information about the Trojan can be found here.

The next security issue is ad.doubleclick.net. Several posters in Apples forum confirm that the iWork applications send information to the advertising company doubleclick.net when the application is launched. It seems like lists of software installed at the computer and the computer model is sent to doubleclick.net without the user's knowledge. Apple has so far not made any comments on this, so we do not know if the information is limited to that, or if other information may be sent under some circumstances.

A serial number is only needed if you buy the downloadable version. If you buy the DVD, you just install it and that is that. This makes it easier to copy the application between machines, and it is likely to increase both the piracy and the usage of the product. There is also a way to hack the trial version to work as a full version, but this is not the right forum to give instructions how to do that.

Finally, iWork '09 includes the possibility to save documents so they cannot be opened without a password. However, Apple has not said anything about what level of encryption is used. The encryption may be very good, but it may also be ridiculously easy to break for anyone with the right tools. We users do not know. For now, I would not recommend anyone to use iWork's password functionality except for harmless documents. Do not use it for bank details, credit card information or commercial confidential information, for example.

All this should remind us that iWork is not just a harmless tool on our harddisks. If one is not careful, one can get into some really delicate situations.

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.