[X4U] Pages '08

[Zane H. Healy]

OK, I realized the problems with Open Type fonts in Pages I've been 
complaining about were largely BS.  Now I honestly don't remember why 
I didn't like Pages '06, though I'm glad I didn't as it means I 
didn't purchase it a couple months ago when I was trying it out.

I like the font handling, to a large extent it works the way I think 
it should.  You can create your own font groupings which is perfect 
for getting them all together for a given project.  Still I think 
there is room for improvements in the font handling.  I'd like to 
know if I've selected a PostScript, TrueType, or OpenType font.  I 
don't see a way to tell that.  I am also having a problem with the 
default font, and I haven't figured out how to change that for 
existing templates.

The one serious problem for me that I see is that it doesn't appear 
to be able to open an HTML document.  This omission seems most 
strange to me.  It is especially irritating as I'm currently using 
HTML as an interchange format to get data from SDML documents (no 
typo, I mean SDML) I'm working on transferred to the Mac.  I also 
found one glitch in a Word document that I opened.

I do not like the fact that you have to export in order to save a 
document as an MS Word document.  Especially when opening an MS Word 
document.  It would be so much cleaner to simply be able to simply 
open and save as MS Word documents, but to have the Pages file format 
be the default for new documents.

Overall I like Pages '08, and if I wasn't already using MS Office 
2004 I'd probably rush out and buy a copy, but as it stands, I can 
simply use Word 2004.  I think I'll take the wait and see attitude 
and see what MS Word 2008 looks like.  If my primary system was an 
Intel based Mac and it let me open HTML documents, I'd probably rush 
out and buy iWork '08.

I had less desirable luck with "Numbers '08" and an Excel document. 
I opened up a document where I'm using Excel to manage a list. 
Numbers failed miserably.  I'm shocked to say, MS Excel seems better 
suited to me at this point.  I didn't give it a fair try, but 
"Numbers" felt non-intuitive to me.

	Zane


-- 
| Zane H. Healy                    | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh at aracnet.com (primary)    | OpenVMS Enthusiast         |
| MONK::HEALYZH (DECnet)           | Classic Computer Collector |
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