Pages 4+

In many ways, Pages is a joy to use, but it lacks just a few small features to make it really great. Ironically, most of the missing features would find very broad use in academia and I had hoped today's event would be the perfect time to (re-)introduce them: (1) Line numbering--This is required by vitually all journals to which academics submit manuscripts, not to mention by lawyers and other groups, but Pages still cannot sequentially number lines throughout a documents. It is irritating to have to move the manuscript to MS Word just to number the stupid lines! (2) Non-contiguous selection--this was present in the "old" Pages but has not appeared since. It is essential in technical writing so you can set all your subscripts or super scripts at once (or efficiently apply italics, etc.). (3) Interoperability with other apps--Compatability with EndNote and MathType was hardwired into pages a few versions ago, but lack of open format and scripting access prevent much more capable, and more frequently updated apps, like Bookends from being nearly as useful as they could be (and as they were in the "old" Pages). There are other minor issues but these are the big three, at least for university-level academics. (And, yes, I have submitted these feedback requests multiple times!)

its main flaw seems to be randomly moving around text and drawings and images in an unpleasant manner as you are editing, requiring tons of rework every time you edit documents. the defults should be less painful. e.g. anchor stuff down by default. what are the proper settings to not have the app move stuff around randomly as you are editing your document? I have no idea. also it needs a "new page" button to start a new page Now, and have the next text you input be anchored at the top of that page, forever. e.g. when u are starting a new section or chapter. you never want edits from the prior chapter to move down the heading and text of the next chapter, but it does. unfortunately, it seems like most if not all page type editors like this have similar flaws about randomly moving our items around in the document as their default setting. why is this? don't the application developers ever try to use this to type a document with images or diagrams in it and see these problems? i add arrows to images and somehow after i edit the document, where are the arrows? they are "somewhere" in the document floating somewhere. why? i have to keep deleting them and re-making them, if i can find them at all. finally ... just give up and forget about the arrows. it is embarassing that document creation is still so broken. it was probably better with earlier word / image processors that didnt try to be so "smart"

Pages is still my favorite word processor, mainly because of its clean, attractive interface. A lot of people — I'm thinking Windows fans — seem to go for a cluttered screen full of clashing colors and inscrutable icons, but the Word interface gets me so irritated I lose track of what I'm trying to write.

Next to Google docs, Pages is the least distracting to use, and it can do most of what I want. But less than Pages '09, and waaaay less than MS Word — which can handle vertical right-to-left Chinese text, insert images in a mail merge, define multilingual styles, and a heap of other things that keep making me go back to it. Luckily, it's free if you go for an Office 365 account with 1 TB of cloud storage, which is a better buy than Apple will ever offer. But I never use Word for work I can do in Pages.

All of the digital giants seem to pride themselves on giving you less and worse than they easily could, and Pages is no exception. If Open Office ever gets a decent interface, they'll get my business, but for now, Pages is the best step up from Google Docs for the user without special requirements.