Pages 3.0 or...?

[valente.mac]

Thanks. I'll try NWP soon and I'll give another try on Pages' TOC.

[xiamenese]

Now I'm curious about NWP. How well does it hadle tables? Because for me, besides the steep learning curve, Mellel (the app that I use for long, complex documents) is very bad on tables. I'd also like to know how it handles long documents. I mean docs with images and tables and more than 300 pages. Is NWP stable enough?

I regularly have to import .docs produced in the Chinese version of Word containing tables. NWP does this pretty well, though they often need some tweaking. This is mostly because I have yet to meet a Chinese who has even the remotest idea about layout -- they are totally unaware of styles, use spaces to produce indenting rather than tabs, seem not to know what can be done with the ruler ... it's because Chinese is totally monospaced, so visually there's no apparent difference -- and so a doc with say 10 tables in it, some will be justified left, some centred.

And thereby lies one of the biggest problems with NWP importing .docs with tables ... left ranged tables tend to get aligned with the left edge of the "paper" rather than with the left margin, so you apparently lose the left column of cells or part of it. But it's an easy problem to fix ... the tables palettes have a button that will centre the table, et voilà, your cells re-appear. (Incidentally, Pages 3, at least until the latest update, would open the table as a vertical column of single cells with no borders visible!)

Second problem, and potentially a more major one, is that NWP doesn't allow cells to be split across page boundaries ... in my experience under NWP the table is not broken, which used to happen with NWE 2.7 where the cell would remain on the page where it started, but the end of the text in it would be invisible. NWP shifts the whole cell onto the next page ... unsightly white spaces, but all the contents are there and visible.

With my set-up (Epson Stylus Photo R350) I have to reset most of the cell borders to at least 1 point, 'cos Chinese colleagues will use hairlines -- again, I doubt whether they are even aware that that is what they are doing -- and my printer won't print hairlines reliably, or not all of them but in a random kind of way.

If you're producing the tables yourself, no problem, it's all there ... merge cells, split cells, insert rows or columns before or after, delete rows or columns before or after, a wide range of border styles together with fills, colours etc., cell padding, horizontal and vertical justification in cells, all available in an easy to use interface.

NWP does floating graphics, though I believe it can have problems with graphics imported in .docs, because of the native Office graphic format. I have no experience of this. There has been quite a bit of feedback on the early versions about no control of padding round floating graphics. A definite absence in the current version is that NWP does not do floating text-boxes and the .doc importer (AbiWord importer) does not handle them, so any floating text boxes in a .doc from Word simply do not appear.

On long documents, mileage does seem to vary. There have been those who have reported hangs on opening very long documents; others say they have opened book-length documents without problem, though it is not instant, of course. I was sent a .txt OCR'd from a scanned book ... my colleague wanted me to find a suitable passage in it for her for use as a text in a coursebook. It opened without problem, the slowness being due to paginating it into some 300 pages, and I was able to use Search and Replace without problems.

Search and Replace is one of the things that I really love about Nisus, since, as well as a normal S & R implementation, it has a full GREP implementation, but in an interface that will build the strings for you if you don't know enough to write them yourself

HTH
Mark

[vic-k]

Val,

Uh?! You mean the widely used Portuguese?!

(Or am I missing something?)[/quote]


My puerile joke

In my village, we are still struggling with our widely used English
Take care
vic

[Simon Knight]

I'm looking for an end application to compliment Scrivener and have been using trial versions of Pages, Mellel and Nisus. One point about MS word document import is that none of them import "floating text boxes" but Pages does post a warning whereas the others do not its a case of where are those missing five pages?

Simon

[xiamenese]

I'm looking for an end application to compliment Scrivener and have been using trial versions of Pages, Mellel and Nisus. One point about MS word document import is that none of them import "floating text boxes" but Pages does post a warning whereas the others do not its a case of where are those missing five pages?

Simon

If you want floating text boxes, for the moment, you're going to have to put up with the slowness and horrible interface of NeoOffice ... or OpenOffice.org + X11, or else Word itself.

Mark

[polymathic]

NWP is ugly. It also makes layout mistakes when opening Word documents. Mellel is so ugly that I couldn't even bring myself to try it. Pages has one major flaw--no autosave. What's the deal with that?

As a result, though I hate MS, I'm still using Word when not in Scriv. It's not pretty, but the 08 version is nicer looking than Mellel & even NWP.

[david_b]

for the moment, you're going to have to put up with the slowness and horrible interface of NeoOffice ...

Indeed, It is ugly. And it is overwhelmed with icons -- at least one can hide all the unwanted icons

But Word 2004 is horribly slow on my MacPro (Intel 2,66/8g RAM) & my MacBook (Intel 2,16/3gigs ram) when working on long document with illustrations. I mean really slow. On a MacPro ? Even Roseta isn't a valid excuse

NeoOffice, on the other hand is long to boot but then works faster than Word 2004. And it works rather well on relatively complex Word documents we sometimes receive (no sophisticated layout, that said). It works definitly much much better than NWP or Mellel for that matter.

[KB]

It's not pretty, but the 08 version is nicer looking than Mellel & even NWP.

I just took a look and the 08 version of Word does look pretty good - though it's not out until January (2008 apparently, but we'll see about that).

[Studio717]

It's not pretty, but the 08 version is nicer looking than Mellel & even NWP.

I just took a look and the 08 version of Word does look pretty good - though it's not out until January (2008 apparently, but we'll see about that).

If it's anything like Word 2007 for Windows, it's a completely different interface and everything will have to be relearned. Very frustrating for someone who's been using Word for a long long time and knows it well (as in me).


If you go with it, prepare for newbie status all over again.

[brett]

This article may be helpful:
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/07 ... s_3_0.html.

[ptram]

...it's a completely different interface and everything will have to be relearned. Very frustrating for someone who's been using Word for a long long time and knows it well (as in me).

I'm one who has hated Word's interface since version 6.0. So, I'm ready to check for the new version with joy. From the screenshots, it seems that they have learned something from other Mac developers.

Paolo

[nadinbrzezinski]

pages will not import my footnotes. I downloaded neooffice. I have Open Office but neo loads faster and it is also free.

The footnotes work fine whe you export the document and open it with new. The comments, I wasn't surprised they didn't show... they simply are not handled in open office.

So if you are looking for a program that will do this and is a very capable word processor give either open office or neo office a swirl

If you need things like indexes... stick to open office and all the ugliness that is X-11.

Yes I am a fan of open source as well... and yes, I use word '07 on the WIN machine... the only reason we got it was... there are some things that for once it does better than it's open office competitor.