Apple’s iWork ’08 Pages

For law students, the Pages application is the most important part of iWork ’08. Having used it for a couple of weeks now, I can say the latest version of Pages is a solid improvement over its already handy predecessor.

Pages Functionality

The ’08 version of Pages reminds me in some ways of an old-school page layout app, because it provides fine control over placement of objects on the page and makes mixing graphics and text easy. But Apple has added word processing features that give it more power as a word processor. For example, Pages implements an elegant Track Text Changes capability.

The Comment feature works in essentially the same fashion. Show Statistics does what you’d expect. There are more goodies in the Writing Tools menu, and as Scott Pollock has already shown us, Pages provides a great deal of power through the combination of Styles and Templates.

Pages successfully integrates the best elements of a word processor with the most important page layout features. Unlike Word, it doesn’t suffer from bloat, and the page layout features don’t feel bolted on and kludgy. But that’s not enough. As we all know, it’s still a Word World out there.

Importing Word Documents

In my experience, most people simply don’t use all of the features available in Word. Most word processing documents are rather straightforward. That said, “Word compatible” doesn’t mean “exactly pixel-for-pixel Word compatible.” As the example below shows, a Word doc opened in Pages isn’t going to look identical to the originating document in Word.

This can cause some slight changes in pagination, which is usually easy to correct. But complicated documents can require more cleanup. As you can see, this pleading document needs some footnote cleanup, and the line numbers haven’t survived the translation from Word.

Neither of these issues are fatal, as long as you can be sure that when you send a modified version of the document back to someone who is using Word, the formatting won’t be similarly compromised. A pleading document is perhaps the best sort of document to test Pages’ ability to export to Word. I opened up a Pages pleading template (52k .zip file) from the JusticeNotBlind blawg, then exported it as a Word document. Here’s how the two compare:

As a 1L I turned in hard copies of all my work, so the shifting that you see above wouldn’t be an issue. As a 2L I had to use a certain pleading format in my advocacy class. I’d turn in a hard copy of my pleading and send a soft copy saved in .doc format. My professor would then return the soft copy, marked up with comments. Pages ’08, for all its advantages, wouldn’t work in such a situation, because the exacting format specifications required for the pleading document would be blown as soon as she opened the exported .doc version.

Conclusion

The degree to which your professors rely on Word, particularly for tracking document changes, will likely determine whether Pages is a useful alternative for you. It’s a smooth application, well-suited to a wide variety of uses, but Word compatibility can still be an obstacle.

Thankfully I’m done with my legal writing classes, so I don’t have to worry about sending people Word docs. I can just save out Pages docs in PDF if I need to send a soft copy. Working in Pages is a real joy.

I haven’t had occasion to delve beyond the surface of the ’08 version of Keynote or the new Numbers app, but I’m looking forward to it. If Pages is any indicator, Apple’s iWork suite is shaping up to be a very capable, bloat-free alternative to Microsoft Office.

You can read more about iWork in this earlier post.

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