Pages in iWork’08 not very workable
The new Pages in iWork’08 seems to have some uncomfortable bugs: it claims quite a lot of memory, hogs the CPU, and often freezes my whole OS X GUI. To put it mildly: I have to restart Pages several times a day to make it usable.
It looks like the memory management of Pages 3 is b0rked. While I’m typing this, Pages is trying to shut down (now for over a minute!). It is using one core of my CoreDuo, and about 70-80% of the time it is spending time in the kernel, increasing the real memory usage (now 471 MB).
The shutdown has now finished, in over 5 minutes!!! AAAARGH.
September 27th, 2007 at 3:59 pm
You didn’t try to open Wicket in Action with it, did you?
September 27th, 2007 at 4:29 pm
Both Eelco and I write Wicket in Action using Pages. It worked pretty well with iWork’06, though the Word export of ‘06 didn’t work well (all pictures were black).
September 27th, 2007 at 4:34 pm
At least it looks pretty.
September 27th, 2007 at 8:04 pm
Wow 471 GB !! How many pages has Wicket In Action ?!
September 27th, 2007 at 8:08 pm
We are not sure yet, but the document in question has about 32 pages (one chapter)
(I will also adjust the number to MB -> my mac book pro can only address about 2GB before smoke comes out of it)
September 27th, 2007 at 10:05 pm
From what I’ve heard pretty much all word processing (do we still call it that?) software disappoints when it comes to book writing. That is, anything pushing 100 pages. Word fails in certain ways, but enough people have used it for books over the years that it’s been forced to cooperate. Pages probably has a way to go, starting with the programmers never daring to test its limits.
And then supposedly the best thing to use is TeX or LaTeX or some weirdly capitalized name for a text format that sounds complicated but in the end is probably worth learning. Personally I would start off trying to write in Textile or Markdown, see if that hits a wall. I haven’t really used a word processor in years.
September 27th, 2007 at 10:23 pm
We actually started out using DocBook, but that is really impossible to write without a decent wysiwyg editor. Nothing open source is available that supports DocBook in any workable way.
Next we tried open office, but that was slow to work with, and images are not very well supported (they copied that from Word). So we settled on Pages and that hasn’t been disappointing until the recent version.
I’ve used latex for my master thesis and I’d love to use that for writing, except for the obvious problem of just plain word processing. The biggest hurdle is that it is not compatible with publishers and editors that want to use Word’s change tracking for feedback.
September 28th, 2007 at 12:16 am
I remember using Mellel (http://www.redlers.com/index.html). The huge advantage over everything else in OS X was that I was able to paste a Omnigraffle drawing as vector (i guess that’s also possible with Pages though, but not with Open office or MS Office). Compared to pages Mellel uses subpixel antialiasing, which is an obvious difference (at least for me, maybe I’m antialiasing freak). What I was kinda missing were references inside document, I know they were working for it but I’m not sure it’s implemented yet.
September 28th, 2007 at 3:09 am
I have memory problems with Pages, but if I shut it down once a day it isn’t too bad for me.
September 28th, 2007 at 6:48 am
[...] I just wrote about my troubles with Pages and trying to write for Wicket in Action. Apple support is really quick: my blog entry was not up for longer than 8 hours, and they apparently already have fixed it! About Pages 3.0.1 This update primarily addresses issues with change tracking and performance. [...]