Pages 5 features checklist

carlosayala wrote:

Do any of you know how to make background objects selectable?

Not sure what you mean...

I've opened a couple of '09 documents with background objects and they simply appear as 'foreground' objects which you can then select. So I suppose this feature is enabled automagically... (or perhaps since there is no 'background' anymore, the command is obsolete...).

Fortunately you can still lock things and move things to the master (whatever that is in the new version - yet to explore).

The fact is, I'm trying to remove my signature from a document and can't! I added it initially as a PNG pic file, and it had no background. Now, I've been practically zooming and trying to select it from any part of it and it just doesn't select itself.

I really miss the full option inspector.

Started a similar thread here:

Deleted features from Pages 4.3 to 5

carlosayala wrote:

I'm trying to remove my signature from a document and can't!

Hmm. I see what you mean. I created a document in Pages 09 with a transparent PNG signature, put it in the background, saved the file and then opened in Pages 5. The background object is not initially selectable with the cursor / mouse pointer.

But I did find a slightly weird but effective work-around.

1. "select all" (Apple+A) - this will also select the 'background' png
2. Deselect everything else (tricky I know if you have a long document... but conceptually possible at least)

   NB. although can now grab the selector boxes on edge of the png, you still cannot actually select the png (so clicking mouse on png and trying to move it will simply de-select it)

3. Now cut the PNG and Paste it back. It will come back in the wrong place I expect, but the pasted back PNG is now fully accessible via the cursor / mouse.

If you have a long document and deselecting everything except the PNG is not an option, a second option is simply to "Apple A" the whole document and do a cut / paste. This should at least elevate the PNGs from the background... (but quite possibly break lots of other things).

My guess is that you have found a genuine bug in Pages 5 (rather than a selectively deleted feature). The authors of Pages 5 must have decided to remove the idea of 'background' from the new document format, but did a poor job of the routines used to elevate objects when importing from old versions. I would hope this is one to get picked up in an early bug fix.

HTH

carlosayala wrote:

The fact is, I'm trying to remove my signature from a document and can't! I added it initially as a PNG pic file, and it had no background. Now, I've been practically zooming and trying to select it from any part of it and it just doesn't select itself.

I really miss the full option inspector.

Try enabling the Show Layout option (from the View Menu, select Show Layout). This might show you the PNG's layout and allow you to select it.

My problem is that there is no way I can find to send an object behind the text. The Back, Front, Backward, Forward buttons are all grayed out, even when you set text wrap to "None." This worked in version 4.3. Apparently, in v.5 you can only send objects behind other objects, not text.

There are a lot of shortcomings to Pages v.5--they need to go back to the drawing board. Sounds to me like this wasn't tested thoroughly. Perhaps in their haste to release it at the Oct. 22 event, they cut a lot of corners. I hope they will fix them soon...

Mark,

Per my original post, the "Open With" selection is not sticking. It keep reverting to opening everything with the updated apps.

Krypttic

First time I tried resetting the Open With application it opened in 5.0. I looked at the dropdown on the info page and saw that indeed the selection for 4.3 didn't take. I tried it a second time on the same file and it opened in 4.3. I tried a different file, opening it back and forth between 4.3 and 5.0. The file opened consistently in the selected format.

Persistance is key, I guess. But I didn't change Open All With This Application because I'm not sure where I'm going with 5.0 yet. I'll leave that for you to try.

Dyvel:

I tried D&D several file formats into a blank Pages document. Only one that worked was .txt.

Grevious Harm.

They also seem to have gotten rid of the auto-correct options, which means (as far as I can tell) that unless you disable the system-wide smart quote option in Mavericks, you'll get smart quotes when you use Pages on the Mac and straight quotes when you use the iPad app, which is going to make for some pretty ugly, inconsistent documents.

Thanks a lot. It worked. It's tricky but effective.

Since my iWork '09 wasn't from the App Store, I had to pay for the new one. I don't care how cheap it was- I feel like Apple sold me a car that runs great and gets good mileage... but has no turn indicators, mirrors, or lights.

Yeah, it's a car, but I can't use it!

enteecee wrote:

Since my iWork '09 wasn't from the App Store, I had to pay for the new one. I don't care how cheap it was- I feel like Apple sold me a car that runs great and gets good mileage... but has no turn indicators, mirrors, or lights.

Yeah, it's a car, but I can't use it!

You should ask for a refund. The iWorks upgrade is free to anyone that had bought it before, whether through the App Store or through a DVD. I had bought iWorks on a DVD years ago. Yesterday, the App Store would not let me update the iWorks apps without asking for a $19.99 payment for each app. But today, they updated for free.

And interestingly, the old versions of the iWorks apps were left behind on my system. So given some of the problems with the new versions of the apps, I still have the choice of using the older version which provide more features than the new version.

I must say I'n no big fan of Pages 5 either.

Especially the new comment system.

I used comments A LOT in Pages 4.3, and liked the way the comments was shown, and being able to read every comment without having to hover over every single one of them.

Another thing i miss is the ability to format the text in notes (e. g. make bulletpoints in comments).

But THE WORST PART is, that searching (cmd+f) does not even search the text in comments, which makes comments quite useless in my perspective.

Another thing i miss from Pages 4.3 is the enhanced search tool (cmd+alt+f).

TL;DR:

The new commenting system is quite useless, but it was quite good in Pages 4.3, and i miss the cmd+alt+f search.

I want to go back to my old version - can I just do this through Time Machine? Will I have to go back to OS X 10.7 as well? The first time I actually used Time Machine was prior to installing 10.9 (I was under the impression I had to have a Time Capsule to use it).

I had exactly the same experience. Yesterday I had to pay to get Pages, but today Keynote and Numbers just updated- I figured I must have paid for the suite.

I still have '09, too, but I was really looking forward to this update and am quite let down. iWork '09 was such a slight update from it's predecessor, and after all this time I thought we were going to get something that, if not great, was at least cleaned up. What we got appears to be unuseable.

I'm on the line now about a refund, and trying to confirm FROM APPLE that the features most important to me are inded dead, and not just hiding undocumented somewhere.