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Pages (word processor)

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Kalarn (talk | contribs) at 20:48, 10 June 2009 (→‎Pages and Word: Removed a section which is now outdated. Microsoft offers a free upgrade to allow the use of Word 2007 files in Word 2004.). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

For other uses, see Pages (word processor) (disambiguation).
Pages
Developer(s)Apple Inc.
Stable release
4.0.2 / May 28, 2009
Operating systemMac OS X
TypeWord processor / Page layout
LicenseProprietary
WebsitePages

Pages is a word processor and page layout application developed by Apple Inc. and a part of the iWork productivity suite. Pages 1.0 was announced in January 2005 and started selling one month later. The most recent version, Pages 4, was announced in January 2009 as a component of iWork '09 and runs on Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and 10.5 Leopard only.

History

Pages on Mac OS X is the successor to Apple's multipurpose office suite AppleWorks. The first rumors of a new Apple word processor to replace AppleWorks circulated the Internet through Mac rumor websites in 2003, suggesting a new software package to be released by Apple called "iWorks" or "iWork". Many Mac users were expecting the new program (which rumor sites then claimed would be called "Documents") in 2004. Steve Jobs, Apple CEO finally announced iWork '05 along with iLife '05 at the beginning of 2005.

There was a program of the same name made for NeXT computers by Pages Software, Inc., including similar WYSIWYG page layout features as Pages for Mac OS X. Since Apple acquired NeXT in 1997, this has led to suggestions that these programs are based on the same codebase. However, since Pages Software's NeXTSTEP assets seem to have been acquired by a Chicago-based IT solutions company, this speculation appears to be unfounded. It is known that Pages for Mac OS X was developed by the same team that developed Keynote 2, a presentation program included in iWork.

Features

Pages includes support for multi-column layouts, paragraph and character styles, footnotes, and Mac OS X built in typographic capabilities. The program can create lists, URL links, page breaks, and will accept data from iTunes, iMovie and iPhoto. Pages contains templates for newsletters, invoices, essays, stationery, invitations, educational materials and other types of documents.

Pages can import later-release AppleWorks word processing documents and Microsoft Word documents (including Word 2007's Office Open XML format [1]), and can export documents to RTF, PDF and Microsoft Word .doc formats.

Pages and Word

Pages is frequently compared with Microsoft Word 2008 for Mac[citation needed], since Pages is the successor to AppleWorks' featured word-processor. It could be reasonably argued however that the comparison is unfair, since Pages was meant to be easier to use, necessitating that it provide a subset of Word's functionality. It's also worth noting that Apple's iWork suite is priced approximately 80% lower than Microsoft Office.

Microsoft Word 2004 has the following features that Pages 3.0 lacks: Pages 3.0 has the following features that Microsoft Word 2004 lacks:
  • Autosave (which can be used to recover unsaved documents in case of a crash)
  • Visual Basic macros (Removed in Word 2008)
  • Comparison of two documents
  • Multiple document versions (Pages has one version of each document)
  • Organization Charts
  • Linked and Embedded Objects
  • US Barcode printing
  • Master documents
  • Grammar Checks for several languages
  • Vertical Script and Japanese furigana
  • WordArt
  • Drop Caps
  • 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.)
  • Native "Save" to HTML format (Pages 2.0 "exports" to HTML. Pages 3.0 has no HTML export at all.)
  • Editing of HTML
  • Split document window
  • Multiple document windows for the same file
  • Italics and bold in fonts with no built in typeface for it.
  • Hidden text
  • Footnotes, bookmarks, and comments in tables
  • Different page orientations within the same document
  • Save and open RTF files with pictures (Pages opens and saves RTFDs which may contain images, but does not handle pictures embedded in RTF.)
  • Paste Special — for pasting a chart as an image
  • Vertical alignment of text in tables
  • Hyperlinked cross-references
  • More shapes as opposed to Pages (ex. Cylinder, Cube, Doughnut)
  • Save and open Pages documents
  • Save and open RTFD files
  • Support for Mac OS X Services
  • Image Masks (Added in Word 2008.)
  • Image Levels
  • Snap images to Alignment guides
  • Copy/paste text formatting
  • Instant font size scaling (Added in Word 2008.)
  • Customizable text shadows
  • Multi-language dictionary (Word has several language dictionaries, but for each part of the text, one has to decide which language it shall be checked against.)
  • Ligature control (Added in Word 2008.)
  • Advanced typography features (glyph variants, ornaments, etc.)
  • Full-screen view*

Neither Pages 3.0 nor Microsoft Word 2004 or Word 2008 for Mac OS X has fully working support for right to left scripts like Arabic, Hebrew and Persian.[citation needed] Neither product supports the OpenDocument format. *Used only on full Microsoft Windows-based personal computers[citation needed]

Other functions that exist in both products are often implemented in very different ways when it comes to ease of use.[citation needed]

Version history

Version Number Release Date Changes
1.0 February 2005 Initial release.
1.0.1 March 17, 2005 Fixes isolated bugs and issues causing problems to some customers. It also allowed the deletion of template pages.
1.0.2 May 25, 2005 Addresses issues with page navigation and organization.
2.0 January 10, 2006 Released as part of iWork'06. Includes new templates, table calculations, photo masking with shapes and freestyle bezier curves.
2.0.1 April 26, 2006 Pages 2.0.1 addresses issues with charts and image adjust. It also addresses a number of other minor issues.
2.0.1v2 May 1, 2006 Pages 2.0.1 addresses issues with charts and image adjust. It also addresses a number of other minor issues.
2.0.2 September 28, 2006 Pages 2.0.2 addresses issues with Aperture compatibility.
3.0 August 7, 2007 Pages 3.0 released as part of iWork '08. Introduced compatibility with Office Open XML (Microsoft Office 2007) files. Introduced Change Tracking. Transparency tool for pictures. Pages 3.0 needs only a third (260 MB) of the harddisk space required for Pages 2.0 (760 MB) despite the added functionality.
3.0.1 September 27, 2007 Addresses issues with performance and change tracking.
3.0.2 January 29, 2008 This update addresses compatibility with Mac OS X.
3.0.3 February 2, 2008 Compatibility issues.
4.0 January 6, 2009 Released as a part of iWork '09. New features include the ability to edit in full screen view, better compatibility with Microsoft Office, and the option to upload documents to the new iWork.com service.
4.0.1 March 26, 2009 Improves reliability when working with EndNote X2 or MathType 6, or deleting Pages files.
4.0.2 May 28, 2009 Improves reliability when saving documents.

See also

References

  1. ^ "Apple Inc. compatibility page for iWork '08".

Template:IWork

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