One of the minor annoyances when I got my new computer earlier this year is that Apple no longer supports MS Word (I knew this going in). I didn’t particularly want to switch Apple’s Pages program, no matter how much they blather about its awesome graphics and design capabilities. I’m a writer. I use text. And I knew there’d be just enough differences from Word to be distracting.
Over time, annoyance has risen to serious dislike. Partly it’s the continued annoyances, but I do a lot of stuff in Scrivener, so that’s minimized.
A bigger issue is that there doesn’t seem to be any way to format a standard manuscript in Pages. When I open a formatted Word manuscript, the first page is blank. If I fix that, then the first page header becomes the same as all the other headers. As far as I can tell from using Help or the instructions, there’s no way to fix this, and no way to differentiate first page and subsequent headers in a new document.
That’s incredibly inconvenient. Fortunately as it can save to Word and I still have my old computer, I can just transfer the stories and get them in proper format there.
Still, it’s amazingly annoying I need to do that at all. It’s not like text-writing programs are cutting edge, I’m sure Apple could have managed to keep all of Word’s features if they wanted.
To end on an up note, here’s Powers’ cover for Robert Heinlein’s Double Star. All rights to image remain with current holder.
Have you tried LibreOffice? I don’t know how stable/usable the Mac version is, but the Windows one is quite serviceable for formatting.
Tried it. My Air shut it down.
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