Apple Inc (AAPL)

[Tex]

re Pages

I would use Pages if it were (a) faster (it has lag so bad I have to wait to see what I typed, and I have to wait to see where I'm dragging pictures or boxes with text and pictures) and (b) more feature-rich (I tried to do things like change the font of the auto-numbered paragraphs and could not; it doesn't have support for things like turning text into and out of smallcaps, which may not matter to you but if you want to craft smallcaps without a smallcaps-specific typeface, other word processors will do it, and IBM's would even let you tweak the size of the small caps in the smallcaps so you could get any ratio you wanted).

I've actually created 50p documents with it, and shorter documents with pictures, and I have to say that although it was painfully slow its output was beautiful. Now if only Apple's PDF and the PDF at Kinko's would synch up so I didn't get weird printing artifacts at the front of paragraphs and the like ....

In short, Pages has some nice features, it makes beautiful output, and it has a serious future. I would prefer that Pages actually have a document format that made some kind of sense (the original was apparently a well-designed XML, but later updates hacked this all to hell) so it might be usable in other tools, or on other platforms, without risk of butchering it. Editing some of the text, for example, would be extremely valuable to be able to do in an XML editor if away from one's own shop.

Take care,
--Tex.