BC Law IPTF Blog

I’ve decided to give the Apple iWork Pages ‘08 a fair shake in the word processor wars. It’s taking me a bit to get used to it. But my first impression of the cleanliness of the interface and the way it aesthetically “fits in” with the Mac environment assisted my persistence with the new world. (The biggest thing, immediately, was that it “knew” how to size the page and text to my 12″ Powerbook screen. Word always felt a bit uncomfortable: Was the page screen in the middle of the screen or to the left? Normal view or Page view? Zoom at 115% or 135%? Things like that.)

Let’s start by saying that it’s been about a month, and I’m still using it in lieu of Microsoft Word.

There’s no default font setting in Pages. So if you want all your documents to *not* use Helvetica 12-pt, then you have to create a new “Blank” template. (My font is Georgia 11-pt, for the record.) I can handle that.

You create shortcut keys for special characters in the Preferences… menu option. For example, in Word I’d map option-6 to the “section” symbol; option-shift-p to the “pi” symbol for “plaintiff,” etc. In Pages, I map things differently. Instead of key combinations, I use typed macros: “-s” for section, -pp for pi. Fine.

What kills me is that two dashes doesn’t auto-correct to an em-dash without a trailing space in Pages. (”Dash dash space” instead of just “dash dash.”) And when I insert mathematical symbols, the leading gets screwed up. And the bullet schemes are weird; I like the Word filled bullet on level one, then hollow bullet on level two. And their nice thick bullets, not the anemic ones that Pages uses.

But there are smart things in Pages. (Like the many more smart things in Numbers, the Excel rival.) I just tried a spell-check. In Pages, it’s called Proofread. And you know what it proofread for me? It told me that “prior to” is too wordy, and I should just use “before.” Ah, proofreading only a lawyer can love! And then it told me that I should limit my usage of the word “input” to computer and other technical uses. Kind of groovy, if you ask me. It’s the touch of an actual editor and proofreader, and not just some linguistically brute-force algorithm that makes vague suggestions insulting your style a la Word.

And so I’ll continue to plug away with Pages. Hopefully I don’t get stuck with Betamax on this one.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 7th, 2007 at 12:14 am and is filed under Software, Law School, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.