[Tsilou B.]

In the other thread about Pages that has unfortunately turned into a flamewar (that's why I'm starting a new thread), most people discuss if it's a good idea that Pages doesn't have grammar checking, AutoCorrect(TM) or BIU buttons in the toolbar.

What I really want to know, however, hasn't been answered. Can you use Pages to create a manuscript for a book with let's say 300 pages, footnotes, tables and figures?
Does it stay responsive if you have that many pages? Does it crash all the time? Does it do stupid things like putting footnotes on the wrong page (Word constantly does this, even in Word 2004). Can it export these documents to Word format without losing important information? (I think it's not that bad if the pagination changes, but it certainly isn't acceptable if footnotes get lost, entire paragraphs are suddenly underlined, non-Roman Unicode characters are lost or something like that).

By the way, I know that LaTeX is probably the best application for writing long documents and I use it all the time - but it's not something my father would want to use and it has an important drawback: You cannot easily export to Word format or import Word documents from others.

[cpac]

I'm not sure pages has been out long enough for anybody to have put together a 300 page document to try this out...

[mitchell_pgh]

I'm sure it CAN handle it, the real questions is would you WANT to do it. There seem to be so many other options.

[Judge_Fire]

Well surely someone who has Pages could paste in a largish text document?

J

[Sharky K.]

30 pages goes very well, but that is not as big as 300 pages though.

[Millennium]

I don't think anyone's tried a 300-page document, but they're not tough to find: go to Project Gutenberg, get their translation of Les Miserables (three megs of raw ASCII text), and copy/paste it in. If Pages can handle that, then it should be able to handle almost anything.

As for converting Word docs to LaTeX, it's not terribly easy, but I managed it once by bouncing it off of AbiWord: import the Word document and then using the LaTeX plug-in to export that. The LaTeX code it returns isn't perfect, but it gets the job done, and optimizing it isn't too difficult. Converting LaTeX docs to Word, however, isn't something I've yet been able to figure out.

[Curios Meerkat]

I opened a 500 pages manuscript (.doc), with footnotes, etc. and it did not have problems with it. Unlike Nisus Writer, which took a long time to open the file and was extremely unresponsive.

[Tsilou B.]

Originally posted by Curios Meerkat:
I opened a 500 pages manuscript (.doc), with footnotes, etc. and it did not have problems with it. Unlike Nisus Writer, which took a long time to open the file and was extremely unresponsive.

Yep, when I tried Nisus Writer Express, I had the same problem, and because Pages is written in Cocoa, just like Nisus Writer Express, I feared it would become similarly slow. Thank you very much - I'll order iWork now.

And btw, thanks to Millennium for that AbiWord/LaTeX tip!

[Superchicken]

I was thinking the same thing, actually with the easy addition of graphics and designing pages however the heck you want em in pages I was thinking I might finally write my book and ilustrate it at the same time (course I'd be perpetually editing it but whatever hehe)