Pages is a word processor and page layout application developed by Apple Inc. and a part of the iWork productivity suite (which also includes Keynote and Numbers) developed by Apple. Pages 1.0 was announced at the beginning of 2005 and started selling in February 2005. Pages 3 was announced on August 7 2007 and runs on Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and 10.5 Leopard only.

History

Pages on Mac OS X is the successor of Apple's multipurpose office suite AppleWorks. The first rumors of a new Apple word processor to replace AppleWorks circulated the Internet through Mac rumor websites in 2003, suggesting a new software package to be released by Apple called "iWorks" or "iWork". Many Mac users were expecting the new program (which rumor sites then claimed would be called "Documents") in 2004. Steve Jobs, Apple CEO finally announced iWork '05 along with iLife '05 at the beginning of 2005.

iWork '08 began shipping in 2007 which includes Pages '08, Keynote '08, and Numbers '08 (Apple's spreadsheet application).

There was a program of the same name made for NeXT computers by Pages Software, Inc., including similar WYSIWYG page layout features as Pages for Mac OS X. Since Apple acquired NeXT in 1997, this has led to suggestions that these programs are based on the same codebase. However, since Pages Software's NeXTSTEP assets seem to have been acquired by a Chicago-based IT solutions company, this speculation appears to be unfounded. It is known that Pages for Mac OS X was developed by the same team that developed Keynote 2, a presentation program included in iWork.

Features

Pages includes support for multi-column layouts, paragraph and character styles, footnotes, and Mac OS X built in typographic capabilities. The program can create lists, URL links, page breaks, and will accept data from iTunes, iMovie and iPhoto. Pages contains templates for newsletters, invoices, essays, stationery, invitations, educational materials and other types of documents.

Pages can import later-release AppleWorks word processing documents and Microsoft Word documents (including Word 2007's Office Open XML format ), and can export documents to RTF, PDF and Microsoft Word .doc formats.

Pages and Word

Pages is most often compared with Microsoft Word 2004 for Macintosh.Fact: date=September 2008 The following are features present in Microsoft Word 2004 for Mac OS X but absent in Pages 3.0:

• Autosave (which can be used to recover unsaved documents in case of a crash)
• Visual Basic macros (Removed in Word 2008)
• Comparison of two documents
• Multiple document versions (Pages has one version of each document)
• Organization Charts
• Linked and Embedded Objects
• US Barcode printing
• Master documents
• Grammar Checks for several languages
• Vertical Script and Japanese furigana
• WordArt
• Drop Caps
• Native "Save" of RTF and Word format (Pages "exports" to RTF and Word format, but subsequent changes have to be exported again through a number of dialogue steps.)
• Native "Save" to HTML format (Pages 2.0 "exports" to HTML. Pages 3.0 has no HTML export at all.)
• Editing of HTML
• Split document window
• Multiple document windows for the same file
• Italics and bold in fonts with no built in typeface for it.
• Hidden text
• Footnotes, bookmarks, and comments in tables
• Different page orientations within the same document
• Save and open RTF files with pictures (Pages opens and saves RTFDs which may contain images, but does not handle pictures embedded in RTF.)
• Paste Special - for pasting a chart as an image
• Vertical alignment of text in tables
• Hyperlinked cross-references