UK user. Can I write my PhD thesis using Pages?

Any other academic Pages users out there?

If you haven't done so already, type "thesis" in the search box for the forum to see the other discussions which have taken place on this topic. Best to do it on this page so you get more than just Pages 09.

http://discussions.apple.com/category.jspa?categoryID=155

By definition, this is avoided in the design of AAT as demonstrated at the start.

Perhaps the reference should be explicit rather than implicit. Please see David Opstad, "Comparing GX Line Layout and OpenType layout," specifically the section, "The system support question."

If the intelligence is in the application or the operating system, then the strong struggle with the strong for the advantage in appearance shaping.

If the intelligence is in the intelligent drawing transform, then there may be professional, semi-professional and simply unprofessional transforms, but the field is free.

If the field is free, the market decides the difference between the worthwhile and the worthless.

/hh

Reference:
http://developer.apple.com/textfonts/WhitePapers/GXvsOTLayout.html

Well I haven't yet as I'm only at the beginning of my second year, but I intend to write it in Pages, whether that be Pages '09 or probably Pages '10. Now that it supports EndNote it should be ideal. I can't promise it'll handle 100,000 words (though I don't see why not if you've got enough RAM) but ask yourself, will Word '08 be able to? 🙂 I can't imagine anything less bearable than writing a thesis in Microsoft Word!

You might want to check out Mellel. It's fairly inexpensive and aimed squarely at the heavy duty academic market. And it's not quite as compatible as Pages with the Microsoft world, but it'll handle non-specialist formatting and it's incredibly stable.

I'm a UK doctoral candidate and am wondering if Pages 09 will be suitable for my PhD. It is a literature based PhD, so in my case, no tables/graphs etc required, but will require specific formatting styles.

WARNING: Accepted canons of academic composition (ligatures, small capitals and so forth as per e.g. Harts Rules for Compositors and Readers) can be automatically composed in Apple Pages using Adobe OpenType, Apple Advanced Typography and Microsoft OpenType.

For instance, the following are free with trial installations of Adobe InDesign, Adobe Acrobat and more - Adobe Arno Pro, Adobe Garamond Premiere Pro, Adobe Minion Pro, Adobe Caslon Pro. Similar full featured typefaces are supplied by Apple (Apple Hoefler Text) and Microsoft (Linotype Palatino, for instance).

None of the advanced typography you apply will be searchable when saved into Apple PDF. Adobe has problems and Quark also has problems. If you format the following bug observation from 2002 in Apple Pages using any of the above advanced fonts, you will find the selfsame shortcomings (ligatures, small capitals ... cannot be searched).

Henrik Holmegaard


http://www.planetpdf.com/enterprise/article.asp?ContentID=6521

PDF Best Practices #5: Acrobat Find & Search
Shlomo Perets
April 22, 2002

To see potential problems with products that support advanced typography features, such as ligatures, small caps and old-style numerals, see the Adobe OpenType User Guide, authored with Adobe InDesign and exported directly to PDF:

"2002" is present in the first page below the title -- but cannot be located as since old-style figures are used.
The SFNT acronym present in the first paragraph in page 2 cannot be located, as it uses small-caps.
"Microsoft" is present 5 times in this document -- but none of the instances can be located due to the use of ligatures (ft in this case). Even the word "This" in the opening paragraph in page 2 (line before last) cannot be located due to the use of ligatures. The more common fi, fl, ffi ligatures are searchable in the case of this document, but this is not the case in other documents using these ligatures (this depends on the applications used to author/create the PDF).
While these OpenType features result in a superior typography, they should be avoided in online documents, until Acrobat Find and Search functions are enhanced to support the additional characters.

As an example for a PDF with text that is internally deformed, see the Adobe InDesign Programming Guide. It includes numerous code fragments (see pages 419 and onwards) set in a monospace font, and the same font is used in regular text to indicate function names or related items. All of these are not searchable. Copy and paste the text and you'll see why: "matrix passed" is understood internally as "2# __A".#%%&"". With this type of document, users could have happily used the copy and paste function to reduce typing time/errors when studying or implementing the techniques discussed, but results in this case are of no value.

Ritch E,

Just a word of advice. Keep the process of writing separate from the layout.

I would suggest a fairly simple word processor that can handle masses of text, quickly and smoothly.

Once you have your thesis written, use the text and flow it into a styled layout for the final presentation. You'll find that far more relaxing and as you go you will review and polish the text and discover all those errors that you had seen too many times before to notice.

Form and content are always two different things and not dealing with them simultaneously will make the task much easier.

Some of that's a bit beyond me but I get the gist. Any other academic Pages users out there?

It is, in fact, as simple as simple can be. Apple and Microsoft agreed in 1989 on a two step drawing model for TrueType. First, character codes are mapped to default glyph codes for the default appearance as in lowend newspaper typography (lower case and upper case, no ligatures, no small capitals, no lower case numbers, no superscript numbers, no subscript numbers etc.) Second, the default glyph codes are mapped to variant glyph codes for the supplementary appearance shapings in advanced academic typography. This means that much of what is available for advanced academic typography is not drawn off character codes but off glyph codes. The principle is laid down in ISO-IEC Technical Report 15258: An Operational Model for Characters and Glyphs which states that a composition model is unsuitable for Latin and non-Latin composition when the model can draw a glyph design if and only if the glyph code is depicted directly onto a character code.

To see how much is drawn off character codes and how much is drawn off default glyph codes, open the Apple Character Palette, go to Glyph view, select e.g. Apple Hoefler Text (antiqua or cursive), and click your way down the Glyph Identifiers. Notice that more than half of the GIDs have no corresponding Unicode short identifier (UTF-16). Anything that does not have a Unicode short identifier you should not count on being able to search in PDF.

Peter posted:

Once you have your thesis written, use the text and flow it into a styled layout for the final presentation.

Unfortunately, the problem is not that the source character string is corrupted in composition using the Unicode model for protective separation of glyph processing from character processing.

The problem is that PDF does not support the source character string and the RAM store of the character-glyph mapping. Pages does, but Pages files are not publishable per se.

Whether the author commits his intentions to the standard character set in this or that application does not make a difference to the problem that PDF in fact fails to support the composition model laid down by Apple, Microsoft and the International Standards Organisation.

/hh

Well thank goodness Henrik, the O.P. is unlikely to to type in Apple Hoefler Text and instead use something more legible then.

Good advice though, so we shouldn't type anything on modern computers, PhD or not!

Apple Hoefler Text and instead use something more legible then.

Right, the typographic legibility of Apple Hoefler Text is not stellar, at least not for the cursive.

But the problem of searching persists irrespective of what make of advanced typography font is selected -

Adobe Arno Pro
Adobe Caslon Pro
Adobe Garamond Premiere Pro
Adobe Jenson Pro
Microsoft Linotype Palatino (included with Windows X)
Microsoft Cambria et. al. included with Windows Vista

And the list goes on and on and on - only glyphs drawn directly off characters are searchable, glyphs drawn off other glyphs as per the Apple and Microsoft model of 1989 are not.

I reviewed this for Aktuel Grafisk Information Denmark/Norway/Sweden in September 1994, and to be honest I can't see the difference.

All I can see is miles and miles and miles of advertising for PDF as searchable 'paper without the chase' which one can determine that it is not after a ten minute test.

Sigh,

/hh

All I can see is miles and miles and miles of advertising for PDF as searchable 'paper without the chase' which one can determine that it is not after a ten minute test.

I have read somewhere that MS Word, at least up to 2007 for Windows and 2004 for Mac (not sure about 2008 for Mac) cannot make use of the typographic features which cause the pdf searchability problem which you are describing. Is that correct?

I have read somewhere that MS Word, at least up to 2007 for Windows and 2004 for Mac (not sure about 2008 for Mac) cannot make use of the typographic features which cause the pdf searchability problem which you are describing. Is that correct?

Microsoft posted cc Adobe in 2004-2005 that Microsoft Windows 6 (Microsoft beta Longhorn, release Vista) would enable supplementary appearance shaping for the Latin script.

Since Microsoft Windows 3.1 in 1992, Microsoft has only enabled obligatory simple appearance shaping in the CMAP Character Map for the Latin script.

The reason for this is the commercial conflict between the Unicode character-glyph model and the PostScript configurable name space model, as previously explained.

The Typophile List has discussed the support for advanced supplementary appearance shaping for the Latin script in Microsoft Windows 6 and shortcomings have been suggested.

It should be sufficient to cite these suggestions and say that perhaps support for advanced supplementary appearance shaping in the Latin script has been set back.

As explained, Microsoft Windows is scheduled to include direct support in save dialogs for PDF/1.5, PDF/A (PDF/A-1a or PDF/A-1b, don't know), and XPS.

As the discussion is about the source character string and the mapping from the referenced characters to the rendered glyphs, support for advanced Latin script shaping may have been set back for that reason.

Apple is, of course, free to provide the operating system in such state as Apple sees fit, but it might have been preferable that Apple applied a warning when saving into PDF, as well for Apple customers as for customers of Microsoft, Mellel and more.

If you search the Unicode Mailing List, you will find posts from Apple's John Jenkins starting in 1999 on the subject of supplementary advanced shaping, including ligatures, in Microsoft Word.

For instance, "The problem is that the power of the more advanced typographic systems (AAT/OT) has been restricted to high-end applications that most people don't use. The average computer user has been restricted to systems and applications that don't implement the character-glyph model and so remains locked in the assumption that every blob they want to see on the screen must be separately encoded within the character set in order to be able to see it. We'll have crossed a major bridge when Microsoft releases a version of Word with full OT support and then people can see how they can get precisely what they want without resorting to separate encoding for every glyph."

In the above, the acronym AAT stands for Apple Advanced Typography while OT stands for OpenType. AAT first maps characters to default glyphs using the obligatory CMAP Character Map and then maps default glyphs to alternate glyphs using the optional MORX tables. OT first maps characters to glyphs using the obligatory CMAP Character Map and then maps default glyphs to alternate glyphs using the GSUB tables. Neither Apple nor Microsoft depend on characters to directly draw ligatures, small capitals and so forth.

/hh


Reference:
http://unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/Archives-Old/UML020/0761.html

(not sure about 2008 for Mac)

Searching is neither supported in Apple PDF from OS X 10.4 nor from OS X 10.5. See my answer to you in the thread "Apple Advanced Typography for the writing systems of world scripts" which is in the Pages '08 archive.

Microsoft Word 2008 for Macintosh supports automatic ligation as well with Apple Advanced Typography as with Microsoft OpenType. The Microsoft Word for Macintosh 2008 help is accessible as an HTML document.

"About ligatures and compatibility
"Ligatures are joined or decorative characters that are available for certain characters in some fonts.
"Non-ligature characters
"Joined ligature
"Microsoft Word 2008 for Mac for Mac can display ligatures, but other versions of Word cannot. If your document contains ligatures and you plan to open the document in other versions of Word, the characters that use ligatures look different.
"If you open a document that contains ligatures in Microsoft Office Word 2007 for Windows, or in an older version of Word for Mac, the ligature characters appear as the equivalent non-ligature characters. The document can be edited and saved in Microsoft Office Word 2007 for Windows, or in older versions of Word for Mac. Although the characters do not appear as ligatures in those programs, the ligature information is preserved. If the file is then reopened in Word 2008, the ligatures appear.
"NoteThe width of the ligature characters can differ from the width of the equivalent non-ligature characters. Therefore, line breaks and page breaks might be different without ligatures. To preserve exact line and page breaks, turn ligatures off."

/hh

Reference:
http://www.microsoft.com/uk/mac/help.mspx?target=f43ff76a-90e8-4d20-a8b8-c975e7d e98c81033&clr=99-4-0&parentid=a06afc6b-3559-4f87-9f23-a983f5561e141033&ep=7&CTT= Category&MODE=pv&locale=&usid=

So do you agree that if an author is using Windows Word or Mac Word before version 2008, he does not have to be concerned about searchability when he exports his document to pdf format?

I imagine the same answer would apply to Neo/OpenOffice.

it might have been preferable that Apple applied a warning when saving into PDF

Let's see if we can draft one up for Pages users. Here is a start:

(Draft warning text) Pages can produce text with advance typographical features which, when exported to pdf format, will have only limited searchability. If searchability is important for your purposes, you should make sure you use the following settings:

+Format > Font > Ligatures: None
+Pages > Preferences > General: Uncheck box for Ligatures
+Character Styles: Uncheck attribute box for Advanced Font Features
+Font Panel: Do not make any settings in Advanced (gear wheel) > Typography

(end draft warning text)

Any modifications or additions?