Creating a Full Bleed Document in Pages '08

PeterBreis0807 wrote:
Except Tulse this is such a basic and necessary feature that it goes back to the earliest DTP packages.

But Pages is not really a tool intended for doing high-volume professional printing. Nor should one expect it to be at $27.

I also own Swift Publisher and it has this and much more including inbuilt imposition, spot color etc.

Right, but it costs about twice as much, and is really intended for page layout. Pages is more of a word processor than page layout tool. Its real competition is Word, not InDesign.

If Apple truly offers Pages only as a DTP solution for personal printers, let them say so and not leave so many users in doubt as to what it can do.

I don't think that Apple has ever pitched iWork as anything other than a personal/small business suite. It certainly doesn't have the look and feel (or complexity) of their pro applications like Final Cut.

I do completely agree that there are many small things that Apple could add to Pages to make it far more useful, and that it can be extremely frustrating when one bumps up against such limitations. That said, Pages does a great job at what it is intended to do, and for the price it is a steal. That one needs to resort to InDesign or QuarkXPress is not an indictment of Pages -- rather, the fact that it can replace any of the work one would usually do in those apps is, I think, testament to Pages' usefulness.

(And it may very well be that Apple wants to avoid stepping further onto Adobe's turf, so as to not further aggravate an important OS X developer.)

I hear what you are saying Tulse, but I see Apple has really targeted Pages at the Ms Publisher market. It has made a great deal of its DTP abilities and it was only in recent versions that they made the Word Processing mode to supposedly tailor it better to that task. Something in which IMHO it has failed.

Also I do not see it being US$27 as it is a forced member of a bundle. I make absolutely no use of Keynote and I have played with Numbers simply because it is there.

I am still using AppleWorks because of the incompleteness of the iWork suite.

For Word processing I use iText Pro which beats the pants off Pages for speed and useability. I'd love to fully switch but what's the point if it doesn't quite make it to the destination, or hits so many potholes you wish you had walked?

And I understand your point of view as well, Peter, and I do sometimes wish that Pages had more pro features. That said, in the small charity I work for practically the entire office uses it to produce gorgeous newsletters and sophisticated longer documents, all without my help beyond setting up the templates. And I, as the graphic design person, use it routinely for professionally printed brochures, bound documents, and small posters. It really does suit our needs in a way that neither Word nor InDesign ever did (or could).

As always with these things, it is a matter of what your specific tasks are, and whether the software is the right tool for that job. For the things we do at our office, it is close to ideal -- for others, that may not be the case (and thus other tools might be more appropriate).

I am not aware of any way to make them work in Pages, and I hope I have not led anyone to believe that I did.

As posted previously, the problem is that people want Pages to work within the model of desktop publishing as it was in 1985-1990-1995. At that point, the black printing plane was output with Adobe Type 1 and possibly one more plane with a spot colour was output.

If there were any images, they were manually stripped in (OPI calls only came to be included as PS comments in EPS after 1987 and in 1990 there were not many systems that supported automated stripping in the print server, before rendering in the PostScript RIP).

You may laugh, but I have a white paper on OPI produced by Apple in 1995, the year after ColorSync 2 was introduced. The white paper does not mention ColorSync in one word, only the OPI market for print servers that worked with EPS and EPS DCS which were colour blind processes.

Spot colours, manual stripping marks, EPS DCS, Adobe Type 1 - this world died at Seybold San Francisco in September 1994 when Apple and Adobe announced the shift from 'print, then distribute' to 'distribute, then print'.

This process is still unfolding, and while we know that Apple Aperture belongs in this world, we don't really know where Apple Pages belongs. It presents itself as an interface to the two most important modern imaging models, but it is still not more than a promise.

/hh

Or Swift Publisher which costs US$44.95.

btw Pages actually costs US$79 for someone who has no use for Keynote and Numbers. Ignoring the fact that every upgrade costs another $79 in the hope of bug and feature fixes.

So far Pages has cost me US$237. Actually quite a bit more as I had to pay the local price. Swift Publisher has only cost me the original US$44.95 with no local mark-up as it was bought on the Net.