Word Processor, Page Design
Developer: Apple
Commercial: 79$ (as part of iWork)
Version: 2.0.2
Release Date: 2006-09-28
Last Updated: 2007-02-06
Pros: Strong page layout features; Produces visually appealing documents; iLife integration.
Cons: Not useful as an academic word processor; Big and slow.
Description
Pages is not an obvious candidate for an academic writing software. In fact it is anything but that, and this is exactly why I put it here. Most academics cannot afford to spend all their time researching, reading and writing books. They have to send letters and reports to funders and other door openers, publish departmental newsletters or design lecture posters, and this is exactly what this software is good for.
Pages is the word processor for the iPod generation and
as such offers an easy-to-use and clean interface with
useful toolbars and drawers. It is the ideal choice if you
need to incorporate a lot of media in your documents and
unlike some of its competitors presented on this site, it
manages to flow text around pictures. Also useful is the
possibility to insert beautiful-to-look-at charts (also 3D)
and tables, the latter offering basic calculations. It
comes with a large collection of templates, which enables
you to have the layout for that newsletter or poster
literally in seconds. Anyway, layout design is Page's
biggest strength, as one can imagine with a word processor
coming from Apple. But this is not to say that Page is only
package and no content. It features styles, multi-columns,
footnotes, TOCs and an annotation function. And it exports
into Word format, among others.
But all this beauty comes with a price. The software
takes up over 800MB on your hard drive and can be slow if
you are still typing on an old G3 with less than a gigabyte
of memory. And while the user interface is straightforward
it does not give you the control over certain text
attributes, which are necessary if you are writing to
publish. The actual cash price, on the other hand, is not
too bad with $79, but you can only buy it together with
Keynote as part of Apple's iWork package. Educational
prices do exist, but vary from region to region.
Pages is brilliant for what it was designed for - layout
and designing visually appealing documents. And it is
certainly good enough for typing the odd assignment or
short article, but if you want to write a thesis or a book,
then you should look at other, more specialised word
processors.
Other Reviews
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