You know, Pages on macOS is a good app.
People hate on it, and maybe if I had stronger word processor feelings I would too. But…I don’t, and I like it. It’s flexible without being a giant piece of MS-Word-like bloatware. It produces nice results. And it’s stayed more or less reasonable for •years•.
Most of the hate I hear about it is from people who used to love the manual layout stuff, and are sad that Pages has switched to a lot more automatic layout. There's apparently not another good, cheap app that works the way Pages used to.
It's commonly appreciated among authors, though. The new automatic layout changes, plus the extensive-for-consumer customisation options, make it a solid choice for low-end professional writing and layout. There's a whole cottage industry.
My ebooks are written in Pages, FWIW. They look fine-to-good for published-by-one-guy tech ebooks.
@inthehands I use a text editor — well, several text editors — and markdown for most everything. But when I need to make a pretty document, I use Pages. It just doesn’t fight me as much as others.
Apropos of nothing: If you need change tracking compatibility with MS Word, but would rather not use Word, I found Nisus Writer does the job better than Pages or LibreOffice.
I use Pages a lot, and the version tracking works well when I want to share a document with an editor.
I do have some wishlist items - I wish it had easy keyboard shortcuts for promoting and demoting headings like word always had, and I wish it was more straightforward to modify a style (the ‘update this style’ box can be a bit random about when it will work).
The iCloud syncing between mac, ipad, iphone has proved really useful.
@PlaneSailingGames You can assign keyboard shortcuts to paragraph and character styles, if that’s what you’re looking for:
https://support.apple.com/guide/pages/use-a-keyboard-shortcut-to-apply-a-text-style-tanb8c18c476/mac
Agreed that style updating can be mildly quirky.
@inthehands Thanks - I found that and I’ve assigned F1 to F3 to my main headings, but I still hate it compared to the ctrl-shift-left arrow and ctrl-shift-right arrow from Word!
Plus I have to add it fresh to every new template I create!
@inthehands I'm the sole Mac user at work, so I have Word installed for any documents that other people might have to work on. For everything else I use Pages, because Word is the Gods punishing us for accepting Prometheus' gift of fire.
But yeah, Pages is just SO MUCH EASIER to use. I love Pages.
@davidbcohen Per the subsequent post, I am 1000% fine with it continuing to work just as well as it always has without changing much.
sustainability > innovation
@inthehands it’s my daily word processor. I use it for everything in my personal office.
In my other job (where I’m dependent on computers that are not mine) I’m obligated to use MS Word and I hate it (con odio jarocho)
@inthehands I can definitely join the appreciation thread 👍🙂
I use all of the Apple office apps - and they're just pleasant to use. Simple, good defaults + templates.
Simple things are easy to accomplish, there's no feature creep. Great for home or small office use.
Of course only on Apple ecosystem.
@inthehands I really miss the colours and thoughtful, old-school icons and general look. Here’s an article with screenshots (except it’s a review of iWork 09 as a whole): https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/jan/22/apple-mac-iwork09-review
Below is one of those screenshots from the Guardian article:
Pages, Numbers and Keynote are awesome!
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