I see I can drag photos etc off the page onto this area, but it doesn't show up, only the outlive of it, which you can click on and drag back onto a page.
We were talking about this on another thread. Apple Pages has a pasteboard. I suppose you would not know what a pasteboard is, not because you are ignorant, but because pasteboards became technically obsolete with the transition from line composition to area composition.
The world's first commercial from type store electronically was the 1965 Copenhagen telephone directory produced on a H E L L Digitset 50T1, developed by Dr.Ing. Rudolf H E L L GmbH in Kiel, the Federal Republic of Germany.
Monotype mechanical composition delivered lines of loose letters and Linotype mechanical composition delivered lines as solid slugs. These composition systems knew only the length of the line and the height of the line, everything else was in compositor's casting-off calculation.
The Digiset 50T1 was the first system that had a concept of a column as an x-y co-ordinate space. The column was exposed by a cathode ray tube onto photographic paper or photographic film, but everything else was still in the compositor's casting-off calculation.
The Digiset 50T1 had the shortcoming that it only understood the start and stop of scan lines, not the steps in between. Thus it could paint solid shapes, but not tint shapings in illustrations and not tone shapings in images.
The world's first system that had a concept of the page as a cohesive x-y geometry within which you keyed in the co-ordinates for all the columns at once was the Monotype Lasercomp developed by a Cambridge University engineering team consisting of Prof Dr John Billingsley, Dr David Hedgeland and Dr James Moughton, funded by the Monotype Corporation.
The motto for the Monotype Lasercomp was 'A page a minute with everything in it.' Now, why would this be the motto? Well, you did not have to place a sheet of film for the full printing surface on a light table, paste in the smaller sheets of film for the columns, and finally shoot the paste-up in a copy camera to make the master film for the printing surface.
While this solved the problem of producing a business form or a newspaper chess game with solid rules, solid type, grayscale panels, negative type on solid panels, grayscale type on solid panels and so on and so forth, it did not solve the problem of area separation for fully automated pagination, since computers did not have the calculation capacity.
The first fully automated area separation for colour newspaper printing was implemented by Dr.Ing. Rudolf H E L L GmbH at the Flensburger Zeitung on the border between Denmark and the Federal Republic. This was in 1984 when Monotype and Crosfield Electronics showed a similar solution at IPEX in the United Kingdom.
Adobe PostScript version 23 for the Apple LaserWriter introduced in January 1985 was useless for colour because it had no concept of a four component colour model. In other words, it had no CMYK model. Integrating the leading colour scanner output was still manual.
So, the authorized Danish Bible produced with illustrations by Bodil Kaalund in 1992 was scanned on a H E L L Chromagraph directly to the set of four film separations which were then manually pasted onto the printing master set on a Linotronic 300 from Matthew Carter's beautiful CC Galliard.
The first step towards integrating text and image was taken in the Linocolor project that started in 1990 when the Adobe Type 1 Specification was published, turning the Adobe Type 1 market loose and with it the market for Linotronic recorders.
The Linocolor project could not depend on the Apple Macintosh to compute the calculations, so the MacCTU Color Transformation Unit was developed as a NuBus card. You then saved as Encapsulated PostScript with or without a PICT preview.
The EPS you saved on the scanner workstation while the low resolution master with the PostScript comments to recombine the four separation files were used by the page layout person. She placed the For Position Only in QuarkXPress, set her type, gave you back the QuarkXPress native application with the Adobe Type 1 fonts she had used, and you printed the QXP to your print server that switched the FPO for the high resolution separations before the PostScript program reached the Linotronic recorder.
QuarkXPress, PageMaker and other desktop publishing applications all worked with the metaphor of the pasteboard, because text and image were either not integrated at all or were only integrated in a hacked way through PostScript comments in an Encapsulated PostScript file that the Apple Macintosh operating system could not render to the screen because Apple QuickDraw could not render Adobe PostScript programs - try this in Mac OS 9.2, for instance.
What you are seeing in Apple Pages, then, is a memento of a metaphor that is technically meaningless today.
/hh
