Friday, June 5, 2009

Pages

Pages is a word processor and page layout application developed by Apple Inc. and a part of the iWork productivity suite. Pages 1.0 was announced in January 2005 and started selling one month later. The most recent version, Pages 4, was announced in January 2009 as a component of iWork '09 and runs on Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and 10.5 Leopard only.

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 frequently compared with Microsoft Word 2008 for Mac[citation needed], since Pages is the successor to AppleWorks' featured word-processor. It could be reasonably argued however that the comparison is unfair, since Pages was meant to be easier to use, necessitating that it provide a subset of Word's functionality. It's also worth noting that Apple's iWork suite is priced approximately 80% lower than Microsoft Office.