Pages
Fry's put copies of iWork on sale this week. At $59.99 a copy, I couldn't resist snagging one and spending some time looking more closely at what it had to offer. I spent most of my time in Pages, and I am more impressed with it than I thought I would be.
As I said in an earlier blog, Pages is more of a desktop publisher than a word processor, though it will certainly perform both functions. One of the features that caught my eye was its export options. The program can export its products in .rtf, .html, .pdf, and several other formats. I tried out the .pdf export, and it seems to work well. I'm thinking about taking some of my blogs and putting them out in a .pdf newsletter...or coming up with some other subject for a newsletter folks might be interested in.
One of the coolest things about Pages is its ability to change formatting on the fly. That gives you the ability to play with several layouts and see how it looks before committing to serious production. It's not seamless. It only changes the document below the insertion point. Still, I found it useful for seeing whether 1 column, two column, etc., worked the best.
The downside to the program is that its templates are limited. It does not do labels, and so a Print Shop replacement it is not, at least for now. Of course, if you're using Avery labels, the best way to print those may be on the web anyway. If you have a specific publishing need, be sure to prowl around Apple's web pages before you buy the program to see if there are templates for the project you want to pursue. If not, you might want to be cautious.
It's obvious that if I need to produce something quickly and Pages has templates for it, I'll more than likely use it vice something a lot more complicated like Adobe's InDesign. I haven't tried building anything from a blank page. It's possible that I might actually like InDesign better for such a task. But for the average home user, Apple's Pages is a winner and worth the price of iWork by itself. If you can find it being sold at a discount somewhere, it's an even better value. Just be sure it's rigged for what you want to work on.
As I said in an earlier blog, Pages is more of a desktop publisher than a word processor, though it will certainly perform both functions. One of the features that caught my eye was its export options. The program can export its products in .rtf, .html, .pdf, and several other formats. I tried out the .pdf export, and it seems to work well. I'm thinking about taking some of my blogs and putting them out in a .pdf newsletter...or coming up with some other subject for a newsletter folks might be interested in.
One of the coolest things about Pages is its ability to change formatting on the fly. That gives you the ability to play with several layouts and see how it looks before committing to serious production. It's not seamless. It only changes the document below the insertion point. Still, I found it useful for seeing whether 1 column, two column, etc., worked the best.
The downside to the program is that its templates are limited. It does not do labels, and so a Print Shop replacement it is not, at least for now. Of course, if you're using Avery labels, the best way to print those may be on the web anyway. If you have a specific publishing need, be sure to prowl around Apple's web pages before you buy the program to see if there are templates for the project you want to pursue. If not, you might want to be cautious.
It's obvious that if I need to produce something quickly and Pages has templates for it, I'll more than likely use it vice something a lot more complicated like Adobe's InDesign. I haven't tried building anything from a blank page. It's possible that I might actually like InDesign better for such a task. But for the average home user, Apple's Pages is a winner and worth the price of iWork by itself. If you can find it being sold at a discount somewhere, it's an even better value. Just be sure it's rigged for what you want to work on.
posted by Andy Foster at
3:19 PM
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