[OS X TeX] OT: Pages from iWork
Bruno Voisin
bvoisin at mac.com
Tue Feb 8 01:30:44 CET 2005
Some OT reflections on first minutes of use of a just installed Pages:
- I was counting on it, as a kind of resurrection of MacWrite, to be
able to open old MacWrite II and MacWrite Pro files. Alas, it can't: it
only recognizes the latest versions of the MS Word or AppleWorks file
formats.
- It includes no internal way, nor interface with any external way, for
creating formulas. The straightforward solution is, then, to include
formulas as PDF files. On the other hand, I was able to paste inside a
Pages document a formula created with the antique Expressionist, and to
paste back then edit this formula from Pages to Expressionist. Which
seems to indicate that:
(i) There should be a way to create formulas in a dedicated software
(TeX?), copy them in a specific format preserving the TeX markup, then
paste them in Pages and still be able to paste them back and edit them
in this dedicated software.
(ii) Maybe some tips could be gained, for achieving that aim, by
looking at how MathEQ <http://www.livemath.com/matheq/>, the most
recent incarnation of Expressionist
<http://www.livemath.com/about/oldnames.php>, works.
Looking at the Pages user guide, I noted something very clever (valid
for Keynote 2 as well, and the iLife applications): the documentation
"Pages User Guide", which has a PDF icon and opens Preview.app upon
double-clicking, is actually an application (a .app bundle), containing
several versions of the PDF user guide in different languages, and
opening the version corresponding to the Finder language upon
double-clicking.
Ironically enough, if you navigate inside the bundle to the directories
like "Pages User Guide.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/"
containing the actual user guides, like "Pages User Guide.pdf", open
these in Adobe Reader and look for document properties, you'll notice
the Pages doc was actually created with FrameMaker 6 and Distiller 6.
Sad!
Bruno Voisin
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