No luck with Pages. Writing a book with large diagrams on a Mac?
This has been driving me nuts. I have a course book project that has a lot of graphics, especially diagrams.
First I tried iBooks Author. iBooks Author, however, forcefully changes every diagram (which I can provide in vector PDF or SVG or in any high resolution) to something that is low resolution pixel based image (even does this with PDF export). They become pixelated, the labels become unreadable. Using widgets in iBooks Author sofar has not been a solution. No way to get something that is usable for the reader. I have spent countless hours with all kinds of mechanisms to get this right (up to buying an HTML5 editor and trying to create HTML5 widgets for this). I gave up on iBooks Author/iBooks. Here I am with my 40,000 words and hundreds of images already created. Now what?
I moved to Pages expecting it to be a decent production app for this kind of thing. I cannot offer a book that lets a reader zoom in and such, so I must go back to producing something that needs to be printed. Fine. I can live with that. So I buy Pages.
I found out soon there is no decent book template. Fine, I try to create my own. So, I start out with a landscape A4 blank document,set it up to three columns and correct margins. I create a 'first page is different' layout for the section (but that turns out only to be valid for the headers and footers, not the entire page) and a Section Header level 1. And then I started looking for automatic chapter (section) numbering and using that in a footnote. Say, the same way the Pages '09 Manual is showing it. (And any other Apple Manual). Now I find out Pages is unable to do this. I have to do Chapter numbering by hand. I don't believe this. I have a Word Processing application that cannot do automatic section/chapter numbering! Yes, there are (lame) workarounds with using lists, but these numbers do not end up in the ToC and you cannot have a number after a string, like in "Chapter 1". I can't let listed items stick out on the left. OK, I decide to follow Apple's restrictions. Sections/chapters/etc without numbers. Fine.
Next attempt: placing images and text boxes. In my to-be-template document I want a standard floating text box white text on grey with some text here and there (lik ein iBooks Author). I create that and make it the default textbox layout as explained in the manual. I remove the text object. Now, I do the same for images. I drop an image. Hmm, how do I add a caption (that is a property of an image placeholder in iBooks Author). No such luck. I have to add a text box for the caption and group them by hand. Fine. Now, how do I get references ("view 2.1.2") in my captions so I can point back to them later in the text? Answer: you can't. And even more funny: as soon as you set the just created group as the default for images, the box layout changes from your caption layout to the default text box layout created earlier. In other words: there is one global text box layout default and as soon as you have a group for an image, the image canot have its own default caption format anymore, it follows the global default. Funnier still, add another image to the document: no caption box. Hence, you painstakingly have to create a caption box for each image and group with the image, manage references by hand, etc.
Conclusion: Pages is nice for company brochures, stationary and such. Not good enough for a large book project that requires references, etc.. It is a big disappointment. I wished I had not spent the money.
Note, I do spend decent time in reading the manual, looking for answers and the web and such. But the whole thing has turned into one big waste of productivity.
What am I to do? I will definitely not use Word for projects of this size because Microsoft's engine is so broken that the risk of corrupted documents with unreparable andunexpected layout behaviour is enormous. I have been hurt by that in the past too much. I dislike Word very much. It produces ugly documents and often documents become almost impossible to layout because of some internal chaos in the document format.
Back to TeX? That won't give me floating objects with text wrapping around it, last time I looked. It must be possible (TeX can do anything), but it will be painfully complicated to get it to work.
Any other option?