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.

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.

Where is the "Normal View"?

In Pages '09, version 4.0, the "Normal View" is in the menu View > Enter Full Screen.

The following was written for previous version of Pages.

In some applications, there is a mode in which you can ignore formatting and margins and concentrate completely on the text content. The most well known such mode is probably Microsoft Word's "Normal View". Even a dedicated layout program like Adobe InDesign has its "Story Editor". Unfortunately Pages has nothing like that. There is no way to hide margins and page breaks.

There are a few other programs that have a full screen view, where all distractions on the screen are hidden even more efficiently than in Word or InDesign. In these programs you see the text and nothing else. Even the menus are gone. Examples of such applications for Mac OS X are Scrivener, Nisus, WriteRoom and CopyWrite. None of them is free.

The Poor Man's Solution

However, there is also a free solution. You may not like it, but I will tell you anyhow. It is to go back to the stone age before graphical user interfaces. Follow these steps:

1. Log out.
2. Highlight one of the users, and type alt-Enter. You will now get fields to type Name and Password instead of choosing them from a list.
3. In the Name field, type ">console" (without the quotation marks). Leave the password field blank.
   
4. Press Enter. You are now in character based mode.
5. Type your login name. (Not the free form one displayed in the Login window, but the name of your home directory.)
6. Press Enter.
7. Type your password.
8. Press Enter. You are in! (If all went well.)
   

All you now need to do is to learn how to use a character based editor like emacs or vi.


You are now in the serene land of text only editing. There are no mail or chat programs to distract, no internet browsers, no bright colours - just letters and your creativity.

Once you are tired of text mode, you can return to the real Mac OS X by typing "exit" on the command prompt. A shortcut for this is to type ctrl-d.

Once you are back in Mac OS X, you can open the text file you created with emacs or vi and paste its content into a Pages document, to get the layout right. The result of your creativity deserves it.

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

Export folder to Word, RTF, PDF, TXT or RTFD

This AppleScript to export the content of a folder with Pages documents was kindly created by Yvan Koenig. You can find more of his scripts at his Public iDisk. If you prefer to export a selection of files, you may want to have a look at the scripts in this post, which use a Scriptlet.

To use the script below, copy it all into a new script in ScriptEditor and run. Due to blogspot's layout, you may not see all characters here, but they should be copied properly, if you highlight all the non-proportional text below.

(*
Export pages documents as Word ones in the folder where the original docs where.

Assuming that we start with:
AppleScript & Office.pages
it will be exported as:
AppleScript & Office.doc
If a file already exist with the short name
it may be saved as:
AppleScript & Office#20080128T221639.doc  (if withSeconds is defined as true)
AppleScript & Office#20080128T2219.doc  (if withSeconds is defined as false)

the serial number is a packed version of the date/time of the save process:

2008/01/28T22:16:39  or  2008/01/28T22:16

Thanks to Dale GILLARD who teach me the way to export without using GUI scripting.

Yvan KOENIG
28 janvier 2008
29 janvier 2008
*)

property withSeconds : false (* you may set it to true if you wish *)
property typeNum : 1 (* 1 = WORD, 2 = PDF, 3 = Txt, 4 = rtf, 5 = rtfd *)

property newExt : ""
property newType : ""
property types : {{"doc", "SLDocumentTypeMSWord"}, {"pdf", "SLDocumentTypePDF"}, {"txt", "SLDocumentTypePlainText"}, {"rtf", "SLDocumentTypeRichText"}, {"rtfd", "SLDocumentTypeRichTextBundle"}}

tell application "Finder" to set listeFichiers to every item in (choose folder) (*
dans un bloc Finder pour avoir un titre de dialogue "localisé"
• in a Finder block to get a localized dialog title. *)
if (count of listeFichiers) = 0 then return
open listeFichiers

-- ===========

on open (sel)
repeat with elem in sel
my exploreTraite(elem as alias, "")
end repeat
end open

-- ===========

on exploreTraite(elem, ptree) (*
elem est un alias
elem is an alias *)
local elem_, cl_, typeId_
set elem_ to elem as text
tell application "System Events"
set cl_ to class of item elem_
set typeId_ to type identifier of elem
end tell
set cl_ to cl_ as Unicode text

if cl_ is "file package" then
if typeId_ is "com.apple.iwork.pages.pages" then my TraiteUnPackage(elem_, ptree)
else if cl_ is "folder" then
my ExploreUnDossier(elem_, ptree)
else
-- not for us
end if -- cl_ is …
end exploreTraite

-- ===========

on ExploreUnDossier(dossier, ptree)
local nomElement, cheminElement, c
repeat with nomElement in list folder dossier without invisibles
set cheminElement to dossier & nomElement
tell application "Finder" to set c to name of (dossier as alias)
my exploreTraite(cheminElement as alias, ptree & c & ":")
end repeat
end ExploreUnDossier

-- ===========

on TraiteUnPackage(aPackage, ptree)
local docPathAndName, oldName, docName, newExt, newType
(* aPackage always ends with a colon, we must remove it *)
set aPackage to (text 1 thru -2 of (aPackage as Unicode text)) as alias

set {newExt, newType} to types's item typeNum
tell application "Finder"
set sourceFolder to (container of aPackage) as Unicode text
set oldName to name of aPackage as Unicode text
end tell -- Finder
set docName to (text 1 thru -6 of oldName) & newExt
set docPathAndName to sourceFolder & docName

tell application "System Events"
if exists file docPathAndName then
 set docName to (text 1 thru -7 of oldName) & my serialize() & "." & newExt
 set docPathAndName to sourceFolder & docName
end if
end tell -- system events

tell application "Pages"
open aPackage
save front document as newType in docPathAndName
close front document
end tell -- Pages
end TraiteUnPackage

-- =============

on serialize()
local cd, serial
set cd to current date
set serial to (year of cd as text) & text -2 thru -1 of ("0" & (month of cd as number)) & text -2 thru -1 of ("0" & day of cd) & "T" & text -2 thru -1 of ("0" & hours of cd) & text -2 thru -1 of ("0" & minutes of cd)
if withSeconds then
return "#" & serial & text -2 thru -1 of ("0" & seconds of cd)
else
return "#" & serial
end if
end serialize

How do I create Word Art with Pages?

You cannot.

If you want to let the letters dance over the page following curves or shapes, you have to go beyond Pages.

A few other products that support wordart like features are Art Text and Comic Life, but there are more ones out there. You can check Version tracker for more alternatives.

Where did all those tabs come from?

When you open a Pages document, it has no visible tabulator stops at all.

However, there is a hidden set of default tab stops, just like in Open Office, Microsoft Word and many other word processors.

As soon as you add a manual tab stop to a paragraph, all previous default tabs disappear:


The distance between the hidden default tabs is defined in the inspector.



However, sometimes a paragraph suddenly gets plenty of visible tabs:

This can happen if you paste text from applications like TextEdit or AppleWorks. These applications do not have the concept of hidden default tabs, so they have to use real visible tabs instead.

The easiest way to get rid of them is to apply a paragraph style without tabs. You can often simply click on the red triangle to the right of the style name and choose "Revert to Defined Style".

Where do I find more templates?

If you want to find more templates than what is already included with Pages, there are several places on the web where you can find some. Try for example iWorkCommuniy. On the web you can also find some commercial ones that may fit your needs, but make sure you know what you get before you buy them.

As you can import Word files, if you find some nice MS Word templates, you can create Pages templates from them. You may need to change the extension from .dot to .doc to be able to import them.

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.

Is there a Pages Viewer for Windows?

No.

If you only have a Pages document and a Windows PC, it is very difficult to see the Pages document as the author intended it. You have only two options:

1. Get a Mac with Pages, or call the original creator of the document and have the Pages document saved in a format that can be read on Windows. That usually means Word or PDF. If you want to edit the document on Windows, only Word or RTF formats work. RTF files with images and tables are not supported.

2. If the file was saved as a package, you can look at the files inside the Pages document directory and try to make something out of the different pictures and xml files that are there. You may at least get an idea what the document is about. If the author set the checkbox "Include preview in document", when the file was originally saved, this may work out reasonably well.

If you want to see what the Windows user will see in a Pages document you can control-click on the file in the Finder and Show Package contents.



You will see the included images and other files in their directory structure. If you clicked the checkbox "Include preview in document" when you saved the file, you will even get a PDF file with all the text and some very compressed pictures in the QuickLook folder.



Anyhow, there is currently only one application that can open Pages files, and that is Pages.

(The situation is the same for Numbers and Keynote documents. There is no available reader for Windows.)

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.

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.

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.

How can I embed sounds or movies in a document for Windows users?

In Pages 3.0 you cannot. In Pages 2.0 there was a cumbersome and not elegant way to do it with HTML export.

Exporting to pdf or rtf will not embed movies or sounds.

Exporting to Word will link the movie/sound to the document, so it will play fine on your own computer. However, if you transfer it to another Mac, you will have to transfer the movie/sound as well as a separate file.

And even if you send both Word document and movie/sound to the Windows user as two separate files, it may not play on Windows. The help for MS Office 2004 for MacOS X says "Compatibility Report: Inserted QuickTime movies might not appear in Office for Windows."

How do I reference a cell in one table from another one in a formula?

In Pages 5 (2013) you enter a formula (Insert > Function > Formula Editor) and click on the other table, and a table reference (usually something like "Table 1::A1:A2" will be added automatically.

However an imported Word document with referenced tables does not get converted properly. If you import that document to Pages, you will see that the cross reference is removed. How to do it in MS Word is described in MS Office help. It is not that easy, but you enter formulas from the Table menu and you have to add bookmarks to tables to be able to reference them.

In Pages 4.3 or earlier, this does not seem possible - not even using Applescript. If you open the Applescript dictionary for tables in 4.3, you can see that a table has no properties that are not also properties of graphics. This unfortunately means that a table works like a black box, whose content cannot be reached by the outside world.

Why cannot Pages show pictures in .rtf files?

Part of the reason is that Pages is silly. If a picture is in a file, it should of course display it.

However, there is method in the madness. When it comes to rtf-files, Apple decided not to support pictures, as the rtf handling of images is too limited. Rtf supports only jpg pictures and png pictures and a number of "meta" image formats. This means that if you insert for example a small eps or pdf-file into an rtf document, MS Word will have to convert it to jpg or png, and then it is no longer scalable, even if you print on a printer with high resolution or with a large paper format. You can see this by simply increasing the view size in MS Word.

When an application like TextEdit saves to rtf, it instead uses rtfd, which allows for pdf and other high quality scalable formats.

If you open an rtfd from TextEdit in Pages the edges are still smooth with a high magnification. However, in any magnified rtf Word the edges of original PDF files are jagged.

So, Pages it not that silly after all? Oh, yes it is:

1. If a well formatted rtf file contains a picture, there is no excuse why Pages should not display it.
2. When Pages exports to rtf, it does not warn you that it is not going to export to rtf at all, but to rtfd, which no Windows application can read.
3. Not only that, the embedded picture in the rtfd file is not PDF! It is tiff, which is a rasterized bitmap format, so it still gets the jagged edges.

I really want to use Pages, but you keep recommending other word processors. Don't I ever need Pages?

No.

You never need Pages. It would be exceptional if you ever needed to do something that only Pages could do.

However, there are a lot of things Pages does really well.

If you want a great layout for a document with correct colours, shadows, typography and image handling, Pages does an excellent job for its price.

There is currently no cheaper program that handles that kind of layout tasks better than Pages. There are a few much more expensive programs of course, like Adobe Creative Suite. But many more expensive programs, like MS Word handles most layout tasks less well. MS Word is for example completely unable to handle ligatures or the typographic features of OpenType fonts, even though Microsoft were the ones who developed OpenType with Adobe.

Besides, if you think these FAQ are as much about what you cannot do in Pages as what you can do, that may be a sign that Pages is reasonably easy to use. What Pages can do is usually easy to do, so people will not ask how to do it. However, it is not always easy to see what limitations Pages has, so that is where people ask questions. And this blog tries to answer them.

People send me files with macros, but the macros will not run in Pages. What should I do?

Do not use Pages. Use the word processor that created the document. There is a fairly good chance that it is MS Word 2004. (MS Word 2008 for Mac does not support VBA macros.)

People send me .rtf files with pictures in them, but the pictures are not displayed in Pages. What should I do?

Do not use Pages to open those files. Instead use one of the free word processors like OpenOffice or NeoOffice or AbiWord or a pay for word processor like Nisus Express or Mellel or many other ones.

Apart from images, Pages 3.0 cannot handle RTF files with tables either. The solution is the same: use another application.

Sharing Pages documents with MS Word users with or without using the Export command

If someone tells you to use Pages to edit Word documents, I'm afraid you got bad advice. Pages has many features that will not show up in Word documents, and Word has many features that will not show up in Pages documents.

Pages is not built to edit Word documents, which is why you have to Export to Word format and cannot Save. You may like it or not, but that's the way things are.

If you are dead set on using Pages for your MS Word documents, there is a hack at Lee Findlow's site.

Otherwise try OpenOffice and NeoOffice. They are both free. If you do not like them, but prefer something that looks and feels more like MS Word, try MS Word.