The Silicon Amanuensis: Apple Pages, a New Alternative for Writers
Steve Beisner -- July 31, 2009
There's a new kid, or perhaps young adult, on the block where word processors live. For a long time Microsoft Word has been the big shot of word processing. Word Perfect has been showing its age for some time and is now doddering into oblivion. OpenOffice now matches Word in almost every area, is free, and is solid as a Humvee, but is also as ugly as one. Enter Apple's new version of the Pages word processor: capable and beautiful.
Apple computers are increasingly popular with writers. (At the recent Squaw Valley Poetry conference I saw dozens of Apple laptops and not a single Windows PC.) If you have an Apple, there is a new word processing option.
Pages has been around a few years now, and has always been an attractive program, visually. It is especially adept and producing documents that are more than just words: none of its competitors can do as good a job at page layout, or in incorporating photographs, graphics, charts, sound, and video.
Pages is sold as one of the three programs in the Apple iWork '09 suite of "productivity" applications. The suite is inexpensive at $79. The other two programs, Keynote, and Numbers are for preparing presentations, and making spreadsheets, respectively.
Until this '09 release, I pretty much ignored Pages except for a few times when MS Word or OpenOffice failed me in trying to make a complicated layout. But Pages '09 is ready for prime time.
The problem with earlier versions of Pages was that the program was missing a key feature for the writer of novels, memoirs, histories, or other long works: it had no way to easily navigate around the structure (Part / Chapter / Scene / Paragraph) of a long manuscript. If you've never used the outline feature of MS Word or the Navigator feature of OpenOffice you may not know what you're missing.
Pages' outline feature is superb. One click of the Outline button in the tool bar toggles the display between the normal what-you-see-is-what-you-get page view and the outline view. Once in outline (assuming you've used styles for the various heading levels) you see a easy to understand and edit outline to any depth you select. If you select "Show only the first line of paragraphs" (another toolbar button, when in outline view), you can select "all" for the outline level and get a compact display of your entire manuscript down to the paragraph level.
I won't belabor the point, but being able to find things this way, for example to see visually that a certain scene occurs in the first fifth of the book instead of half way through, or that your early chapters are short and your last chapters are long, can be very useful.
Pages can open MS Word files and can save in MS Word format as well, so you can use the more civilized Pages while still being able to share your work-in-progress with the heathen.
Pages even works with such arcane MS Word and OpenOffice features as the "Track Changes" ability so beloved of editors and writing teachers.
The only thing which gave me pause was the way paragraph styles are defined in Pages. In Word (and OpenOffice) one clicks through a series of dialog boxes to create or edit a style. In Pages one formats a paragraph the way the style should be and then just tells Pages to create or save the formatting of the paragraph with a name for later application to other paragraphs. The Pages method, while novel, is arguably much easier for non-techies to wrap their heads around. Also while it is possible with MS Word and OpenOffice to arrange styles in a hierarchy, so that a style may "inherit" some formatting items from other styles, Pages doesn't allow this... again, arguably simpler for mortals.
If you have a recent Apple computer and you'd like to try a word processor that is as beautiful as the novel you're creating, give Pages '09 a try.