Apple Pages and Styles Redux
A few days ago I commented positively on Apple’s Pages styles UI. This is without having actually used it. Having just tried the latest version of the application, I’m rather appalled at how limited the styles support really is.
- they effectively deprecated the style-based UI in the new version, switching to the more familiar (and broken) direct formatting approach
- one can only edit styles by directly editing text, and then telling Pages to redefine the style based on those changes
- no support for style hierarchy it seems (!)
- whoever designed the default templates and styles did a horrendously poor job of it. The default font almost everywhere is Helvetica (!). This is despite the fact that OS X ships with a really excellent text font (Hoefler Text).
Sigh … so much for good examples. The result would be a nightmare for users really, forcing them either to rely completely on presentational formatting if they didn’t want the defaults, or having to modify every single style (since there’s no inheritance). For the limitations I’ve noted in OOo, it’s way ahead of Apple on this count.
