Pages for iPad Rocks!

I'm working on a book in an application I'll just call "Scriv…nnnnaarrrrgh," and I learned late in the game that to finish formatting the manuscript, I must manually tweak nearly all the section breaks in the manuscript (which sometimes will not submit to formatting, because it hurts their tender wittle scalps!). Don't ask me why The Sciv…nnnnaarrrrghati didn't, you know, let invisible characters lie, but I think it has something to do with "THE CORK BOARD". They seem to be very proud of THE CORK BOARD…at the user's expense.

Anyway, I learned a thing or 40 in that experience, but the most important part is that you really don't need to format your manuscript and its section breaks within the app, which shall not be named. I realized I could simply take my manuscript and drop it chapter by chapter into (wait for it) PAGES!

So that's exactly what I did! I started moving my book, chapter by chapter, into Pages on Mac, and you know what? After three chapters, it stopped letting me create new chapter names. It asked me to keep the chapter names unique, but it rejected every attempt to use unique chapter names. As if my book is going to be three chapters, with the last chapter being 300 pages? Wow! The Mac has certainly gotten LAZY, I thought. So this is it. I'm done! I’m going to have to herd invisible section breaks for the rest of my life in the app, which shall not be named!

But as I hung my head in defeat, I found myself staring at…my iPad! Yes! It has Pages too! So once again into the breach, old friends! As I opened Pages on my iPad Pro and loaded the file I'd started on my Mac, I cleared out the cruft from my Mac's attempts to make it work. In Pages on the iPad Pro, all I had to do was put a unique chapter title in the footer of the chapter's page, and the chapter title propagated to all the pages of just that chapter, not beyond.

So that’s my tip, dear friends. If you find yourself trying to format a manuscript with an app, which shall not be named, remember:

USE PAGES ON AN IPAD!