"Equally space objects" problem in Pages and Keynote

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Level 1

4 points

"Equally space objects" problem in Pages and Keynote

Hi,

The "Equally space objects" of Pages (and Keynote as well) doesn't work as expected. I wrote a topic on Apple forum in 2009 about the wrong Pages 09' behavior but it still not fixed...

On this image :

You have three rectangular blue shapes with different widths, and after selecting them I asked to distribute horizontally with the sidebar popup menu in pages : the result is the image.

The blue rectangle in the middle should be in the gray column because the two gaps should be of equal sizes, but they are not. This strange behavior doesn't occur in any other drawing suites (illustrator, affinity, etc...), and it was not even present in apple iWorks before 2009...

This bug is also present if you ask to distribute vertically objects of different heights.

It's a big problem when people wants to arrange multiple shapes of different sizes : in this case, the most current case, the "equally space objects" feature is completely useless...

If you want to "play" with this, you can download my Pages file with this link.

Yours

Eric

Posted on May 9, 2024 1:20 PM

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Answer 1

erichake Author

Level 1

4 points

May 9, 2024 8:04 PM in response to VikingOSX

I wrote that Keynote and Pages have the same eratic behavior, but for me, for example, Keynote is a powerpoint killer. In my point of view Pages and Keynote are not "consumers" products like any others...

You tried to do it with Affinity Designer, and I often work with it also, but you seem to say that the explanation would be that Pages and Keynote are "consumers" products and not "professional" ones. Then let me give you the comparison now with Google Draw, which is also a "consumers" product, and far behind the drawing features of keynote and pages :

Google Draw also do it just fine...

I'm not asking for a new feature, I'm just asking simply to fix one : the Pages and Keynote user guide speak about "Equally space objects" and for the moment nothing is "Equal".

I contacted support, but I also wanted to give this feedback on the forum so maybe other people would ask for the same thing...

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Answer 2

erichake Author

Level 1

4 points

May 11, 2024 6:30 AM in response to VikingOSX

Thank's VikingOSX !

I have just posted the "Equally space objects" bug report to Apple products feedbacks (https://www.apple.com/feedback/) to join the teams : Keynote, Pages, Numbers and Freeform ones because this bug is present on all Apple products that have this feature.

I also wrote to the iOS and iPadOS teams because the bug is also present on iPhones and iPads.

I hope someone will follow up on this request...

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Answer 3

May 9, 2024 2:30 PM in response to erichake

Neither Apple nor the Pages product team participate in these public user-supported communities. What you expect Pages to do is not implemented in the product as it is not a page layout tool like InDesign, Quark, or Affinity Publisher where you would have exact controls for this purpose.

Pages is a free product and after the initial 2013 rewrite (It was not a port of Pages '09), Apple is unlikely to expend engineering resources (e.g. expense) on a gratis product designed for consumers, not professionals. It took Apple 11 years to reintroduce non-contiguous text selection into Pages v14.

Speaking of Affinity, I own Affinity Designer 2, and using exact cm measurements I duplicated the design in your image above. When I told Affinity Designer to Align and Space Horizontally, it produced the precise result you seek. Affinity Designer is purpose-built for this solution and Pages is the wrong tool for precision work.

That said, you can send direct, informative feedback to the Pages or Keynote product teams from the respective application menu, but don't get your hopes up it will be responded to, or implemented in our lifetime.

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Answer 4

May 10, 2024 5:30 AM in response to erichake

I don't disagree that Pages and Keynote should perform proper object distribution and have mentioned how you can communicate that directly to the respective product teams. Contacting Apple Support, or posting in these communities won't achieve that goal.

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