Q: Pages 5 features checklist

Sorry, Involuntary Typo Disorder. I meant, If Apple wants to abandon Pages 4.3 and alienate all the users, they might be willing to sell the rights to the code. Then whoever buys it can be our savior by keeping Pages for Grownups alive.

The Pages Help files (http://help.apple.com/pages/mac/5.0/) are now available.  This helped me figure out how to add my custom templates to Pages under iOS and iCloud.

Hi Peter,

Thank you for your efforts in maintaining this discussion. I have been off line (Mavericks download chewed up my Peak internet allowance and I can only use my Off Peak residue until refresh on 1st November.)

Getting back online (during Off Peak, 1 a.m local time) I saw a deluge of email notifications to your original post. Stay strong, my friend. You are doing a good job.

Regards,

Ian.

Peter,

One last thought, now that I have had time to settle down and have recovered most of my work and my workflow (of which returning my iPad to Pages 1.7.2 was a big part).

Pages by no means was the best word processor. It missed key features such as indexing, competent grammar checking, bibliography support, etc. etc. These were all obvious potential improvements for Pages 4. But there is one key feature that should be number one on your list and has not been mentioned at all in this discussion.

Steve Jobs became interested in programming after taking a course in calligraphy. His major contribution to the world (I think even if you were to ask him) was bringing that kind of beauty and serenity to the computer. Not the glitzy stuff like special effects, or works-of-art aluminum boxes, etc. But the subtle beauty of a well proportioned font well balanced on the page. The end product of Pages was just more beautiful to look at than any other word processor - it made all of Pages short-comings worth the effort. Even Apple's version of Times New Roman font, 'Times,' was a much more beautiful, serene font to look at. As for me, I can just look at a book and know if it was created in Pages, it looks more professional, it has an inner sophistication most might miss.

"I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating." - Steve Jobs

"When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through." - Steve Jobs

Times was not a completed font, it never got reverse characters like Hebrew right - it would break constantly if you tried to use reverse printed languages. iBook Author was already abandoning 'Times' for this reason. I suspect it became too cumbersome to fix, so out it went, but this was the beginning of the end. (I, myself, would switch to Times New Roman if I needed to do Hebrew). What's being missed in this discussion is that what defines the Mac as a 'Mac' is not Ive's minimalist design, or the collaboration features, or even in the astounding effects... no the Mac DNA lived in Steve Job's understanding of fonts, his understanding of proportion. It's like the difference between Star Wars and Casa Blanca, Pages had achieved a serene quality standard unmatched by any other company. When you bury Job's fonts, you've buried Job's vision, which I might add has also been done with Mavericks when Ive replaced the system font with his own - they purposely, arrogantly, masachistlicly killed off the remains of Steve Jobs... and I think he would agree. Jony Ive, for all his whimsical metaphors, sage-like attitude, and art training, never understood fonts the way Steve did - Ive wrongly interprets this as 'minimalism.' Most won't see it, but it was the fonts that made OSX a wonder to behold and to work on. Pages 5 even if it worked right has become garish, ugly, not only in its 'look,' but in its understanding of the creative process. It's not just about work-arounds, features, etc. It's about becoming almost transparent so that the creative process is unhindered by the technology. Pages 5 is diabolical... it is Screwtape.

There is a perversion going on here - it is almost like someone knew the heart of Jobs, where it lay in Apple, and had to kill it off. Jobs wasn't perfect, none of us are, but Apple should have at least understood what made Jobs great and respected that DNA.

Not sure if I've seen this addition yet:

There's a couple of extra shadow effects now. The contact shadow is subtle, but effective. (just in time for flat design trends...)

There are one or two things I could have seen myself using the new 'iWork for iCloud' apps for. Like the long overdue fix to copy/paste style to multiple cells in a table (this flaw in Original iWork has sent me back to Excel many times). However, I'm not finding it easy to copy/paste back and forth between v4.3 and v5, in fact you'd better add this to the removals/alterations list, Peter...

Copying and pasting objects like images and tables from Pages 5 into Pages 4.3 converts them to non-editable PDFs. I am not making this up. (I have exported a Pages '09 document with my nicely formatted table, but it's a faff. It would have been nicer if Apple had added this fix to iWork when I asked many years ago).

Yup, that's it. What ever you call it, integrity? Aesthetic understanding? .... it's gone.

Either you see it, or you don't... they don't see it. It will take someone better than I to explain it to them. I just hope your list can at least try to capture that. It's not just about lost features.

Just to toss in my subjective two cents and have a chance to rant

I am very disappointed by the new Pages. I loved Pages '09. It was simple, it was powerful, and while I didn't care for every UI choice, it nonetheless put everything I needed within easy reach. Pages 5 is ugly, cumbersome, and glitchy. I don't like having the top large toolbar open, but with the inspector open there is no way to switch between Format and Setup without it. I prefer not having the inspector open, I really appreciated the typography tools that were available in the top small toolbar in '09. No such luck here.

I also keep running into annoying behavior from autocorrect. I noticed this when iOS 7 came out and the same behavior has now been carried over to the Mac. Haven't quite put my finger on what it's doing, but sometimes I'll backspace to correct a typo and autocorrect will revert me to the error or some such.

Right now I'm hitting something bizarre - in some cases, when I'm at the start of a paragraph and I'm trying to add some bold words, bold won't turn on. I have to type the word, highlight it, then bold it (same with italics).

There have been other quirks I'm running in to, degrading the experience greatly. The last two items are glitches that I'm sure (hope) Apple will get worked out soon enough, but the primary issue is the brain-dead decision to make Pages more difficult to use, strip away features, make the whole thing ugly, and... hope no one would notice?

Work-around to open updated templates in Pages 4.3

Those who updated to Maverick/Pages 5 and have meanwhile reactivated Pages 4.3 (Opened in > Application > iWorks) can open updated templates via > File > New from Template Choser

Another indication that Pages 5 was probably a last minute job done in the early hours before the 10/22 keynote.

Come on Apple, get this corrected real fast!

Not sure if it has been mentioned already, but my most beloved feature was draging a contact from the adress book to a pages document, which instantly inserted the contact details to predefined sender fields.

Also gone: define multiple languages within one document. Need this all the time.

Sorry, even if I just repeat items that others probably already have listed here, count me as another angry voice not getting how customer's needs can be ignored so deeply. The magic of iWorks really has been trodden down.

Peter,

I think this discussion is just now getting to the heart of this - Bravo!

I agree, it is generational, but it is our 'bad' too. When Tim Cook said 'Apple gets it - no one else does,' it should have been a red-flag, a tip off. No one says such a thing unless thay actually don't get it. We all should have ran.

But they hooked me with my upgrade to the iPad. I had no idea the ripple effect it would create - how much I had turned my well-being over to Apple's whims. Never again... never again.

Cosmo