Question about Pages

mrinvisible

Hello,



I'm looking for some informations about Pages. I need some easy to use editor which will be able to handle longer texts without problems, and have some better layout capabilities - not like Word which works for few pages, and then usually something bad happens, and you cannot format your pages really good... My writings will be usually something to the school, so either short compositions or longer articles with chapters, and subchapters.



I was using LaTeX, but it sucks sometimes - it's not so easy, and what more, images, and tables support is pretty bad. How are Pages handling equations? I know that TeX is the best, but I don't need them so often.



I heard that Pages are controlling flow somehow different than Word - how is that? I mean that you have to insert pages, etc... Would it work with chapters?

geekdreams

Pages is a very limited layout app; they give you some templates and you just plug in your own text/images over the placeholders. You can create your own layouts as well, but I'm not sure how it compares to MS Word since I've never used it.

kickaha

The layout tools in Pages are, IMO, much much better than in Word. That said, they're not as good as a full fledged layout app, but then, you can't get PageMaker, Quark or InDesign for $40, either.



Pages is easier to use than it is to describe.



BTW, if you were looking for better support in LaTeX, try TeXShop. It's a LaTeX editor that has all sorts of template support, auto-insert, etc. It has much better support for images than a raw TeX installation, since it defaults to pdflatex, which accepts any image you can throw at it on the Mac. (Any image can be converted *to* a PDF, using builtin tools, so it'll be happy with just about anything, and it looks stunning.)



Also, if you like TeX's equations, but don't want to do all your things in TeX, you simply *have* to get EquationService. It lets you type LaTeX in place in another app, select it, trigger the Service, and the text is replaced with a PDF image of the rendered equation. The LaTeX used to generate the equation is embedded inside the PDF too, so you can revert to text, edit, and re-render without leaving your app of choice. Simply fantastic.

mrinvisible

Thanks for reply, I checked Equation Service, and this application is awesome! About pages - I'm interested now the most how good does it perform handling long structured documents.