7 ms·

I'm surprised nobody mentioned Pages on a Mac. It's a style sheet-based tool, where the styles are quite easy to work with. I've been using it for years now an

by jwr 13y ago

I'm surprised nobody mentioned Pages on a Mac. It's a style sheet-based tool, where the styles are quite easy to work with. I've been using it for years now and it does almost everything I need it to do. I realize there are people who absolutely need every little feature in Word, but for things like letters, technical reports, briefs or software documentation Pages works just fine, and produces nicely-formatted documents. You need to ignore the Apple marketing, for some reason they think Pages and Numbers are used exclusively in a home setting for producing toy documents. I just wish Apple devoted more time to Pages and Numbers, because the tools become annoyingly slow with larger documents (larger meaning a 60-page report with tables). I'd much rather see the existing tools optimized and working fast than new features. And yes, I know this is not a perfect solution. I just think it's better than Word. But I will also point out that LaTeX (or plain TeX) isn't a good solution either. For people who don't know it well, it doesn't produce the results they want. And for those experienced with it, it becomes an unbelievable time-waster because you spend inordinate amounts of time tweaking things for no good reason.

pjmlp 13y ago
FrameMaker and PageMaker?
- cormullion 13y ago
  Ah, FrameMaker was the proverbial dog's bollocks. Unfortunately Adobe bought it.
ancarda 13y ago
+1 for Pages. I once sent a .pages document to a friend on Linux. I was genuinely surprised when he could read it. Turns out .pages is actually a zip file, that when extracted, has a PDF inside. Pages has always scaled fine for me, however Numbers will choke on a gigabyte-sized CSV. I tried to, import the US census data into it. I couldn't get Numbers to work. It crashed every time. Microsoft Excel could just about cope but was struggling to scroll or filter data. Eventually I gave up and threw it into MySQL. The right tool for the job.
- batgaijin 13y ago
  How much ram do you have? Not an excuse for their programmers though.
  - polymatter 13y ago
    I always understood it to be a feature of Excel that it couldn't cope with larger datasets. It means you are forced to consider buying an expense Enterprise SQL license once you are using it in earnest. If it wasn't for Excel chocking on 5million rows I'm convinced most businesses wouldn't bother with databases at all.
    - umanwizard 13y ago
      Well sure, if Excel did X then business wouldn't need another program to do X, and this is true for any value of X. Your comment is a bit like saying "Most businesses wouldn't bother having a cafeteria if only Excel could cook meals." Excel was never designed to replace a database and the fact that it can't isn't some evil plot by MS.
      - GoodIntentions 13y ago
        >> "Most businesses wouldn't bother having a cafeteria if only Excel could cook meals." This part is tongue in cheek, but true. There are businesses out there, where excel is used for everything, including many things it should never be used for. Seriously powerful app. Seriously (ab)used. I don't hate Excel, but I hate the "craplications" hare-brained power users create.
  - ancarda 13y ago
    16 GB. That was enough to load it into RAM, it was a matter of the "right tool for the right job". MySQL handles large datasets easily, probably because it's not trying to display all the thousands of columns x millions of rows at once. I've found the same to be true for editors. Most text editors have struggled to open large log files (500+ MB) whereas cat can open a file of basically any size.
Ralith 13y ago
So if I use LaTeX and it gives me the results I want and I don't find myself spending inordinate amounts of time tweaking things, does that make me an intermediate user? I guess I had better stop learning.
- redacted 13y ago
  I love LaTeX, I wrote a physics PhD thesis in it and many papers as well. It works phenomenally well up until the point it doesn't work at all. And when you need to go fix something it is a deep and frustrating rabbit hole in my experience.
  - seanmcdirmid 13y ago
    The point where something is unfixable in LaTeX is much more complex than the point something is unfixable in Word, where I seem to jump down the rabbit hole on relatively simple documents.
    - sinkasapa 13y ago
      That is a matter of opinion. I think the lack of source code is a problem of incredible complexity, in that overcoming that hurdle would require one to somehow force MS to fix something. I think LaTeX starts marginally easy, gets complex and fiddly but then pretty much just stays at the same level of complex and fiddly. Word starts very easy, gets complicated quickly and eventually presents un-fixable problems, no matter what your skill level.
  - johnminter 13y ago
    That's where version control helps. Save and commit frequently. It is much easier to go back to just before the problem and insert smaller chunks. Found many an error this way. Selective cutting of sections and stashing them in a text editor works as well.
  - sinkasapa 13y ago
    Me too. I'm currently using it for the second time for a large multilingual dictionary. Both dictionaries are the first produced for these languages. People are thrilled at the results. It is so easy to create something beautiful with LaTeX.
m_mueller 13y ago
I'm an avid user of Pages because of its consistent UI. But it's still lacking a very important feature for the usecases you mentioned: cross referencing and bibliography. As an aside: Did you know that you can create a halfway decent xhtml from Pages documents by exporting to epub and extracting the embedded documents? I've used that in the past to create a simple database my wife can edit using the tools she knows (Pages) by converting that stuff to an xml db. You can even script all the intermediate steps using AppleScript. As a platform to hack on, OSX can combine the strengths of Unix with the UI scriptability of Windows OLE.
tanzam75 13y ago
> I'm surprised nobody mentioned Pages on a Mac. It's a style sheet-based tool, where the styles are quite easy to work with. ... Pages works just fine, and produces nicely-formatted documents. Microsoft Word is also a styles-based tool, and produces nicely-formatted documents that are consistent with a stylesheet. The problem is that people don't use the styles.
- tripzilch 13y ago
  I tried doing that in Word once, it's nowhere near the solid foundation that actual style sheets provide (thinking of CSS/HTML here). I only needed to style H1, H2, P, EM and possibly A (they don't have those names in Word, but you get the point). That's probably the simplest document structures you can have for a task that reasonably makes use of styles. The biggest problem was, those styles are like liquid, slipping between your fingers as you work with them. You do one thing to the text and suddenly you find yourself in a style that's "adapted" from a style you've already defined, I think I've even encountered a new hybrid style between two of my user-defined ones. And then there's of course the "built in" paragraph and heading styles, occasionally thrown into the mix as well. The point is, this is not at all like an actual style sheet based way of working, such as with CSS/HTML. You could get the above result by using (bad) code such as <h2><p><em>OOPS</em></p></h2>, you'd also get a mix of three styles. But the thing is, in Word, all these new hybrid styles got added to the style sheet! So get this, I wrote part of a document, decided (as long as I have to do this in Word ..) I'd use style sheets, made the styles, continued writing on the document and the existing styles changed as I moved bits of text around. Not having exactly that happen, is one of the main reasons to have a strict separation of content and style in the first place, is it not? I'm sorry but, I don't think Word actually supports "styles". It's got some stuff that kind of looks like styles, but once you actually try to use it, it'll just waste your time at exactly those moments where you'd expect a proper styles system to save you time. At some point I had finished the content and I decided to make the H2 a bit bigger font. With styles that should be the easiest thing right? Haha! Right. That's when you get to see all the adapted styles that suddenly appeared in your H2's markup, and they don't change along. So instead of just changing your styles, you are going to have to edit your document content anyway. The whole experience was very, very messy. In hindsight I'd have preferred to keep the "style sheet" in my head and apply all the markup manually, like most people do, instead of relying on the program to take care of this for me, but wasting my time instead. No wonder that's the route most people seem to take. (disclaimer: this experience was a few years ago, maybe they fixed it by now and styles are actually styles and don't change while editing your content, and are in fact either applied to some part of the content or not, and not somewhere in between)
crazygringo 13y ago
I came here to say the same thing. The first time I opened up Pages, I was amazed by its relative simplicity and elegance. It actually reminds me a lot of what Word 4.0 was like for the Mac, way back in 1990. I use it for all my personal things, and then Google Docs for business things. So I don't know why the original article suggests competition is dead -- unfortunately Pages is not cross-platform, but Google Docs is certainly a worthy, simpler competitor (though perhaps too simple).
- pstuart 13y ago
  Version 4.0 on the Mac was probably its zenith. And it fit on 2 floppies, IIRC.
protomyth 13y ago
I get the feeling some of the design for Pages came from Pages by Pages for NeXTSTEP. It was a style-based editor and quite nice.

by jwr 13y ago

pjmlp 13y ago

FrameMaker and PageMaker?

cormullion 13y ago
Ah, FrameMaker was the proverbial dog's bollocks. Unfortunately Adobe bought it.

ancarda 13y ago

+1 for Pages. I once sent a .pages document to a friend on Linux. I was genuinely surprised when he could read it. Turns out .pages is actually a zip file, that when extracted, has a PDF inside. Pages has always scaled fine for me, however Numbers will choke on a gigabyte-sized CSV. I tried to, import the US census data into it. I couldn't get Numbers to work. It crashed every time. Microsoft Excel could just about cope but was struggling to scroll or filter data. Eventually I gave up and threw it into MySQL. The right tool for the job.

batgaijin 13y ago
How much ram do you have? Not an excuse for their programmers though.
- polymatter 13y ago
  I always understood it to be a feature of Excel that it couldn't cope with larger datasets. It means you are forced to consider buying an expense Enterprise SQL license once you are using it in earnest. If it wasn't for Excel chocking on 5million rows I'm convinced most businesses wouldn't bother with databases at all.
  - umanwizard 13y ago
    Well sure, if Excel did X then business wouldn't need another program to do X, and this is true for any value of X. Your comment is a bit like saying "Most businesses wouldn't bother having a cafeteria if only Excel could cook meals." Excel was never designed to replace a database and the fact that it can't isn't some evil plot by MS.
    - GoodIntentions 13y ago
      >> "Most businesses wouldn't bother having a cafeteria if only Excel could cook meals." This part is tongue in cheek, but true. There are businesses out there, where excel is used for everything, including many things it should never be used for. Seriously powerful app. Seriously (ab)used. I don't hate Excel, but I hate the "craplications" hare-brained power users create.
- ancarda 13y ago
  16 GB. That was enough to load it into RAM, it was a matter of the "right tool for the right job". MySQL handles large datasets easily, probably because it's not trying to display all the thousands of columns x millions of rows at once. I've found the same to be true for editors. Most text editors have struggled to open large log files (500+ MB) whereas cat can open a file of basically any size.

Ralith 13y ago

So if I use LaTeX and it gives me the results I want and I don't find myself spending inordinate amounts of time tweaking things, does that make me an intermediate user? I guess I had better stop learning.

redacted 13y ago
I love LaTeX, I wrote a physics PhD thesis in it and many papers as well. It works phenomenally well up until the point it doesn't work at all. And when you need to go fix something it is a deep and frustrating rabbit hole in my experience.
- seanmcdirmid 13y ago
  The point where something is unfixable in LaTeX is much more complex than the point something is unfixable in Word, where I seem to jump down the rabbit hole on relatively simple documents.
  - sinkasapa 13y ago
    That is a matter of opinion. I think the lack of source code is a problem of incredible complexity, in that overcoming that hurdle would require one to somehow force MS to fix something. I think LaTeX starts marginally easy, gets complex and fiddly but then pretty much just stays at the same level of complex and fiddly. Word starts very easy, gets complicated quickly and eventually presents un-fixable problems, no matter what your skill level.
- johnminter 13y ago
  That's where version control helps. Save and commit frequently. It is much easier to go back to just before the problem and insert smaller chunks. Found many an error this way. Selective cutting of sections and stashing them in a text editor works as well.
- sinkasapa 13y ago
  Me too. I'm currently using it for the second time for a large multilingual dictionary. Both dictionaries are the first produced for these languages. People are thrilled at the results. It is so easy to create something beautiful with LaTeX.

m_mueller 13y ago

I'm an avid user of Pages because of its consistent UI. But it's still lacking a very important feature for the usecases you mentioned: cross referencing and bibliography. As an aside: Did you know that you can create a halfway decent xhtml from Pages documents by exporting to epub and extracting the embedded documents? I've used that in the past to create a simple database my wife can edit using the tools she knows (Pages) by converting that stuff to an xml db. You can even script all the intermediate steps using AppleScript. As a platform to hack on, OSX can combine the strengths of Unix with the UI scriptability of Windows OLE.

tanzam75 13y ago

> I'm surprised nobody mentioned Pages on a Mac. It's a style sheet-based tool, where the styles are quite easy to work with. ... Pages works just fine, and produces nicely-formatted documents. Microsoft Word is also a styles-based tool, and produces nicely-formatted documents that are consistent with a stylesheet. The problem is that people don't use the styles.

tripzilch 13y ago
I tried doing that in Word once, it's nowhere near the solid foundation that actual style sheets provide (thinking of CSS/HTML here). I only needed to style H1, H2, P, EM and possibly A (they don't have those names in Word, but you get the point). That's probably the simplest document structures you can have for a task that reasonably makes use of styles. The biggest problem was, those styles are like liquid, slipping between your fingers as you work with them. You do one thing to the text and suddenly you find yourself in a style that's "adapted" from a style you've already defined, I think I've even encountered a new hybrid style between two of my user-defined ones. And then there's of course the "built in" paragraph and heading styles, occasionally thrown into the mix as well. The point is, this is not at all like an actual style sheet based way of working, such as with CSS/HTML. You could get the above result by using (bad) code such as <h2><p><em>OOPS</em></p></h2>, you'd also get a mix of three styles. But the thing is, in Word, all these new hybrid styles got added to the style sheet! So get this, I wrote part of a document, decided (as long as I have to do this in Word ..) I'd use style sheets, made the styles, continued writing on the document and the existing styles changed as I moved bits of text around. Not having exactly that happen, is one of the main reasons to have a strict separation of content and style in the first place, is it not? I'm sorry but, I don't think Word actually supports "styles". It's got some stuff that kind of looks like styles, but once you actually try to use it, it'll just waste your time at exactly those moments where you'd expect a proper styles system to save you time. At some point I had finished the content and I decided to make the H2 a bit bigger font. With styles that should be the easiest thing right? Haha! Right. That's when you get to see all the adapted styles that suddenly appeared in your H2's markup, and they don't change along. So instead of just changing your styles, you are going to have to edit your document content anyway. The whole experience was very, very messy. In hindsight I'd have preferred to keep the "style sheet" in my head and apply all the markup manually, like most people do, instead of relying on the program to take care of this for me, but wasting my time instead. No wonder that's the route most people seem to take. (disclaimer: this experience was a few years ago, maybe they fixed it by now and styles are actually styles and don't change while editing your content, and are in fact either applied to some part of the content or not, and not somewhere in between)

crazygringo 13y ago

I came here to say the same thing. The first time I opened up Pages, I was amazed by its relative simplicity and elegance. It actually reminds me a lot of what Word 4.0 was like for the Mac, way back in 1990. I use it for all my personal things, and then Google Docs for business things. So I don't know why the original article suggests competition is dead -- unfortunately Pages is not cross-platform, but Google Docs is certainly a worthy, simpler competitor (though perhaps too simple).

pstuart 13y ago
Version 4.0 on the Mac was probably its zenith. And it fit on 2 floppies, IIRC.

protomyth 13y ago

I get the feeling some of the design for Pages came from Pages by Pages for NeXTSTEP. It was a style-based editor and quite nice.