[OS X TeX] OT: Some wonderings on iWork Pages and NeXT and Pages by Pages

[Will Robertson]

On 13 Jan 2005, at 1:16 AM, William F. Adams wrote:

> Posted the below to www.macslash.org and comp.sys.mac.advocacy --- was 
> curious what everyone here thought.

Live paragraph re-flowing looked gorgeous. And being able to drag and 
drop images into templates and have them transform to fit looked pretty 
nice.

It'll be great if it heavily pushes structured text as much as it seems.

It will be very interesting how much Word compatibility they've been 
able to manage with respect to complicated things like citations and so 
on. What about table of contents exporting to bookmarked PDF? (Word can 
do that now, right? Or is it distiller with the know-how?)

The images I saw all had ragged right text, which would imply to me 
that someone is aware of the lack of good h&j and that's their 
compromise, which I guess is reasonable.

It would be very interesting I think to get some really fancy LaTeX 
templates in the same vein, which would also be good ways of showing 
the fonts available in a distribution.

I'll be buying iWork primarily for Keynote (I wonder if there's an 
upgrade scheme...I doubt it), but I'll enjoy having a look to see what 
Pages can offer.

> Just looking at the screengrabs it seems to let people make some 
> fairly common typographic mistakes (lines too long, leading too tight, 
> excessive word spacing).

Would you have an alert telling people "this line is too long in the 
current typeface"? Word spacing might be a necessary evil if it can't 
do hyphenation, since it is supposed to be reasonably compatible with 
Word.

We can but wait and see.

Best wishes!
Other Will.

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