Q: Pages 5 features checklist

PeterBreis0807 wrote:

 

XtraFinder (free) gives you excellent tabs, much better than Maverick, and available with a logical command t just like in Safari. It also lets you split windows horizontally and vertically, keep folders at the top of the window and more.

How are XtraFinder's tabs "much better"? The cmd-t shortcut works in Mavericks' Finder as well.

Apple, please fix this:

What i mean:

document -> right click -> information -> open with: --- for a single document it works, but if u click "change all", it jumps back to pages 5.0; numbers ditto

Missing

Character count including spaces

(an essential feature for invoicing)

What is it with Apple to cut features from new versions of popular Software (e.g. FinalCut) without prior warnings lately?

Follow-up: I did find a Pages 4.3 back-up, replaced the v.4.1, and have not had a crash; hopefully, that was it.

Thank you for compiling this list, Peter!

I hope folks also go to Pages 5.0 feedback (menu: Pages/Provide Pages Feedback, on on the web, http://www.apple.com/feedback/pages.html) to leave their complaints; hopefully (?), we'll get at least some of the functionality back before Pages 4.3 is kicked out by OSX updates.

PeterBreis0807 wrote:

 

My realistic worldview is that Apple has just killed Pages, and probably the rest of their iWork suite.

 

I am merely suggesting replacements to the extent that they do the job and will not suffer the same fate as iWork because they are core to their creators' businesses, not just toys in Happy Meals.

 

No point looking to Apple it clearly seems to be finishing the job it started over a decade ago of ridding itself of Users who think for themselves in favor of the the much more easily manipulated consumer who can be taxed eventually on breathing, being persuaded that they are incapable of doing that for themselves.

 

Can't say I didn't see this coming, just hoped against hope that Apple would change course. It hasn't.

 

Why doesn't Apple just come out and say that it is going to totally dumb down OSX and iOS so that it is only fit for Facebook and endless Selfies.

 

Peter

I'm in the "completely disgusted" camp. Four years of work in Pages 4.3 has, to my mind, just become wasted effort. It's obvious that Pages is now an end-of-life product for mid-range, but professional, users and I agree completely with what Peter's said above. iWork, for me, enabled me to do more creative work than with MS Office, and the price was significantly more attractive. I like my MacBook. I like the simplicity of OSX. This experience might just be the straw that breaks the camel's back for my continued use of all of them.

Now, with four years worth of Pages work driven into a brick wall, with the knowledge that if I open the files in anything higher than 4.3 that they'll be immediately rendered useless, and that my layouts, styles, etc are frozen in amber forever, I think it's time to move away from Apple's herd before the real slaughter comes. I'm in the happy position that I can afford £9 a month for Office and £40 a month for Adobe's Creative Suite and, while if ever there was a product so heavily overfeatured for my needs Creative Cloud is it, I think I can have some confidence that work I create today will still be able to be used in four years time by software that's been feature enhanced and developed.

I'm quite sad. It's like watching Alzheimers claim an old friend: "I used to know how to style a bulleted list but now I'm not really sure what a bulleted list is."

Peter,

I am working on a book that is already published but that I had hoped to make future revisions on. It is important to retain the exact same formatting. Pages updated on my iPad, immediately converting the book to the new file format, rendering it not openable on my Mac. So I upgraded.

When I did open it on the Mac the table of contents was destroyed and all my illustration were broken (except one which I can't explain because I manually can't reconstruct it). The textboxes which had illustration and captions within still had the captions, but the illustration were randomly scattered throughout the document, some had text flow, others not. They were not associated in any way with their captions. As I began to try to return the book to its former formatting it quickly became a mess - every move reflowed the text and scattered any prior fixes which I would try to redo. This only resulted in breaking the next - on and on. I gave up. Also the styles were broken.

Typically, in any word processor, to make an illustration you create a textbox, anchor the textbox to the referenced text in the document, insert an image in the textbox either through drag 'n drop, cut and paste, or insert/choose. Then under the illustration you type a caption explaining the illustration. All very basic stuff. Every attempt I used above rejected moving the illustration into the textbox. I could not find an alternate way. If you just moved the textbox with the caption underneath the illustration, every time the text reflowed or reformatted the caption and the illustration moved separately - there was no way of locking them together or to the referenced text that I could figure out.

Perhaps there is a work around, I could not find one. But this procedure is so basic to word processing (check your newspaper, it's how they do it) I can't believe there is no intuitive way to do it.

I agree, iBooks Author was moving in the direction I had hoped pages would go, if they would only combine features. It almost looks like the Pages team was shifted to iBooks Author, and the new Pages was created by an entirely new team, computer wizzes, but unfamiliar with the publishing industry, so they just sort of arrogantly freelanced it and took it in their own direction fulfilling their own ideals.

I also agree, Serif products are the bomb. I've begged them for years to move to the Mac platform. Perhaps it's time to move back. Serif Page Plus is what Pages should be. And Serif was excellent at updating their products every year charging rediculously low prices for upgrades. They never once broke the workflow. Brilliant company.

Thanks

To add to the things the new Pages lost is access to Aperture photos. You now only have access to iPhoto. It seems to me that the new Pages caters to the lowest common denominator. Thank goodness I still have iWorks 09.

I used Mail merge a lot and its seems to have gone.  May be some update in the offing. But a way around.  Go to Spotlight and look for pages, Pages09 will still appear. Use that to do the work till Apple updates to help hapless enthusiasts like us. When Pages09 is opened it asks for update, refuse it and get on with your work.

I guess, not a very good way to do but appears to be the only way to get back previous available features.

I'm sorry to hear about your book, but it seems that if you have opened and saved a file in Pages 5, it is lost to 4.3 for ever. Closing without saving seems to preserve the 4.3 structure, but don't quote on this.

The only possibility, it seems to recover these files from the clutches of 5.0, is if you have Timemachine, or similar, and make sure that you don't open them in 5.0. Even though 5.0 is the default shown in File info, 4.3 files should open in 4.3, but to be on the safe side, use the Open selector in the program.

I've looked at the "Package Contents" for two identical files, one 4.3, and the duplicate opened and saved in 5. The hidden structure of 5.0 files is completely different: embedded images (picts from appleworks in this case) have become pdfs, as has the preview image (was a pict). In 4.3, the content was in a file called "index.xml.gz", but in 5.0 it's somewhere else. Just where, I haven't found out as there are a number of files ending .iwa (in "index.zip", the one looking most promising being "document.iwa". However, I can't open it because "it is from an unidentified developer", not in BBEdit or even in Terminal.

See this clearly written and informative commentary about these changes:

http://blog.keynotepro.com/post/64868992195/updated-iwork-apps-are-here-proceed- with-caution

Does anyone here develop Apple software for a living, or represent a company that does? If Apple doesn't wants to abandon Pages 4.3 and alienate all the users, they might be willing to sell the rights to the code. Then you could be our savior by keeping Pages for Grownups alive.