Some people have asked about my reaction to Pages. So here it is: Pages is a simple to use application for creating great looking layouts, but it doesn’t have much in the way of actual writing tools. If you are a serious writer, you need something more focused on writing like Nisus Writer.
In fact, I think Pages and Nisus Writer make great companions: Nisus for writing and Pages for layout. Especially since Nisus Writer documents can be imported by Pages.
NWE and Pages might make great companions, but when I tried importing a NWE document into Pages at MacWorld it lost the styles (i.e., italics still appeared as italic but were no longer in the emphasis style). I don’t know if there is anything Nisus can do about this without the cooperation of Apple.
It appears that Pages does not really do its own RTF support like we do. It uses the standard RTF functions supported by Cocoa. This means that styles will not be imported. Lets hope that they are able to fix that in the future!
I have found Pages to be way more reliable at going back and forth with Word than NWE. (I don’t hold Word as the benchmark but I, like so many are stuck in corporate America with it).
And I would also say that those thinking Pages is mostly a layout app haven’t used it much. After using it since the day it came out I can say it is the only thing I am using now for word processing. (Except when our office uses that track changes (ahem) feature in Word.
I like to see that you all share your timeline for features. I have downloaded and tried NWE many times over the last several years (not trying to exaggerate so please correct me if wrong). I keep waiting for lists and bullets. Seems they are always being planned for the next version.
Please make it the next one. NWE does have some advantages over Pages. But so far I have not found anything that formats and makes styles so easy to use as Pages and it seems to handle long documents with ease.
I agree with the original comment. Nisus complements Pages. It is not a replacement.
Pages is a “page layout” program, sure you can type in it, but it is not a Word Processor, just try starting with one of those templates and put text into one of those text boxes. It won’t be long and you will be frustrated by all the effort it takes to keep your text flowing where you want it to go. Plus the Find panel, multiple clipboards, document manager, etc, etc. You miss Nisus real quick in Pages.