Is Pages suitable to use in writing a book of family history, with text and photos, indices, and diagram?
iMac with Retina 5K display, macOS 10.15
I've recently done this in Pages. About 200 pages, with text, photos, diagrams, table of contents, and a detailed index. I exported it as ePub (for Apple Books) and pdf (for distribution as an e-book and uploading to a self-publishing site for printing).
Pages did a great job with the text and text formatting, photos, internal and external links, generating a table of contents, and generating a table of illustrations with links to the pages they are on. I ended up doing diagrams elsewhere (in Numbers and OmniGraffle) and pasting those into Pages.
Pages, unlike Word, doesn't do indexes natively. I got around that by putting together a script to construct an index with page references. The resulting index wasn't quite formatted to "professional" publishing standards," but nevertheless provided a convenient way to look up people, places, and subjects.
One caveat. Once I got up over a 100 pages or so writing text in Pages became sluggish. But I tend to draft things in TextEdit or Drafts anyway, and then copy-paste in Pages anyway, so that was not an issue for me.
In general, Pages far exceeded my expectations. Easy to use, and nice looking output. Without a huge investment of time.
SG
I've recently done this in Pages. About 200 pages, with text, photos, diagrams, table of contents, and a detailed index. I exported it as ePub (for Apple Books) and pdf (for distribution as an e-book and uploading to a self-publishing site for printing).
Pages did a great job with the text and text formatting, photos, internal and external links, generating a table of contents, and generating a table of illustrations with links to the pages they are on. I ended up doing diagrams elsewhere (in Numbers and OmniGraffle) and pasting those into Pages.
Pages, unlike Word, doesn't do indexes natively. I got around that by putting together a script to construct an index with page references. The resulting index wasn't quite formatted to "professional" publishing standards," but nevertheless provided a convenient way to look up people, places, and subjects.
One caveat. Once I got up over a 100 pages or so writing text in Pages became sluggish. But I tend to draft things in TextEdit or Drafts anyway, and then copy-paste in Pages anyway, so that was not an issue for me.
In general, Pages far exceeded my expectations. Easy to use, and nice looking output. Without a huge investment of time.
SG
Hello mt1244,
Thanks for contacting Apple Support Communities. We see that you are writing a book and are thinking about using Pages to create it. For more information, check out the following resources about creating books with Pages:
We hope this helps!
Cheers!
I didn't do much editing of the old photos. I scanned them, and kept the original look. But between Photos and third party apps on the Mac, you should be well covered there. It was easier than I expected to paste the photos and other images into Pages and resize them, etc.
SG
Hi SG,
Thanks for your response. It looks like Pages will do the job for me. My project is not as complex as yours. This being my first project of this kind, it is good for me to move forward using Pages.
Did you have issues with photo editing? My photos will be old, most taken over 40 to 70 years ago.
John
I want to write a book of family history with text and photos. diagrams, indices and tables. Is Pages suitable for it, or is there another product within Apple offerings that will do the job. Thanks in advance.
