Pages is a word processing program developed by

Apple Inc. Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, in Silicon Valley. It is best known for its consumer electronics, software, and services. Founded in 1976 as Apple Comput ...

that is part of the

iWork iWork is an office suite of applications created by Apple Inc., Apple for its macOS, iPadOS, and iOS operating systems, and also available cross-platform through the iCloud website. iWork includes the presentation program, presentation applicat ...

productivity suite. It runs on the

macOS macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

iPadOS iPadOS is a mobile operating system developed by Apple for its iPad line of tablet computers. It was given a name distinct from iOS, the operating system used by Apple's iPhones to reflect the diverging features of the two product lines, suc ...

, and

iOS Ios, Io or Nio (, ; ; locally Nios, Νιός) is a Greek island in the Cyclades group in the Aegean Sea. Ios is a hilly island with cliffs down to the sea on most sides. It is situated halfway between Naxos and Santorini. It is about long an ...

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

s and is also available on the

iCloud iCloud is the personal cloud service of Apple Inc. Launched on October 12, 2011, iCloud enables users to store and Data synchronization, sync data across devices, including Apple Mail, Calendar (Apple), Apple Calendar, Photos (Apple), Apple Ph ...

website. The first version of Pages was released in February 2005. Pages is marketed by Apple as an easy-to-use application that allows users to quickly create documents on their devices. Many Apple-designed templates comprising different themes (such as letters,

résumé A résumé or resume (or alternatively resumé), is a document created and used by a person to present their background, skills, and accomplishments. Résumés can be used for a variety of reasons, but most often are used to secure new jobs, wh ...

s, posters, and outlines) are included with Pages.

History

On January 11, 2005, Apple announced the first version of Pages, as part of iWork '05. On January 6, 2009, Apple released the fourth version of Pages as a component of iWork '09. On January 27, 2010, Apple announced a new version of Pages for

iPad The iPad is a brand of tablet computers developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple that run the company's mobile operating systems iOS and later iPadOS. The IPad (1st generation), first-generation iPad was introduced on January 27, 2010. ...

with a touch interface. On May 31, 2011, Apple updated the

version of Pages to 1.4, providing it as a universal binary, which allowed the app to be run on

iPhone The iPhone is a line of smartphones developed and marketed by Apple that run iOS, the company's own mobile operating system. The first-generation iPhone was announced by then–Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs on January 9, 2007, at ...

s and

iPod Touch The iPod Touch (stylized as iPod touch) is a discontinued line of iOS-based mobile devices designed and formerly marketed by Apple Inc. with a touchscreen-controlled user interface. As with other iPod models, the iPod Touch can be used as a po ...

devices, in addition to iPads. On October 12, 2011, Apple updated the iOS app to version 1.5, adding the

"Documents in the Cloud" feature. iOS Pages was updated to version 1.6 on March 7, 2012, and will only run on iOS 5.1 or later. Pages for

OS X macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

was updated to version 4.3 on December 4, 2012, to support Pages 1.7 for iOS, which was released on the same day. Pages for iOS 1.7.1 introduced better compatibility with Word and Pages for Mac, and version 1.7.2, released on March 7, 2013, merely added stability improvements and bug fixes. On October 23, 2013, Apple released a redesign with Pages 5.0 and made it free for anyone with an iOS device. In this release, many templates, as well as some advanced features that were available in version 4.3, were not included. Some of these missing features were put back over subsequent releases, but the current release still lacks features from version 4.3, including the ability to select non-contiguous regions of text, advanced find/replace functions, and more.

Features

Pages is a word processor and page layout application. When Pages is first opened, users are presented with a template chooser which allows them to start with a blank document or with a predesigned template — including a basic, report, letter, résumé, envelope, business card, flyers & posters, cards, miscellaneous and a newsletter section of templates — that contains placeholder text and images which can be replaced by dragging and dropping photos from the Media Browser. The Media Browser provides quick access to media from

iTunes iTunes is a media player, media library, and mobile device management (MDM) utility developed by Apple. It is used to purchase, play, download and organize digital multimedia on personal computers running the macOS and Windows operating s ...

iMovie iMovie is a free video editing software, video editing application made by Apple Inc., Apple for the Mac (computer), Mac, the iPhone, and the iPad. It includes a range of video effects and tools like color correction and image stabilization, b ...

, and Photos. Users can drag and drop music, movies, and photos directly into Pages documents from the Media Browser window. Each document window contains a toolbar, which gives one-click access to commonly used functions such as inserting objects (text boxes, shapes, tables, charts, and comments), uploading the document to iWork.com, and adding additional pages. In addition, the document window contains a contextual format bar that allows one-click formatting of text and adjustments to images. When text is selected, the format bar enables users to choose fonts, text size, and color, and to adjust line spacing and alignment. When an image is selected, the format bar displays tools to adjust opacity, show and hide shadow and reflection effects, and mask the image. A separate Inspector window provides almost all formatting options available for any element in the open document. Beginning in iWork '08, word processing and page layout are two distinct modes. In word processing mode, Pages supports headers and footers, footnotes and outline, and list creation. Users can collaborate with others on a document. Pages tracks changes by users by displaying each person's edits in different colors. Users can also add comments alongside the document. In page layout mode, users have complete control over the position of objects on the page. Images and text can be placed anywhere on the canvas. Pages used to feature several other advanced writing tools. Many of these have been stripped out of the current version. The "Full Screen" mode (introduced in Mac OS X Lion) and supported in Pages 4.1 hid the menubar and toolbars, allowing users to focus on a single document without being distracted by other windows on the screen; however, after Pages 5, full-screen mode requires the user to manually hide various panes for focused writing and the page thumbnails pane does not automatically open when the cursor is moved to the left screen edge. Earlier versions featured mail merge, which automatically populated custom fields with contact data from the Address Book or

Numbers A number is a mathematical object used to count, measure, and label. The most basic examples are the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and so forth. Numbers can be represented in language with number words. More universally, individual numbers can ...

apps to create personalized documents. For example, if a user wanted to send one letter to three people, mail merge allowed the user to create a single document with placeholder fields that were populated when printing. The mail merge feature was completely removed in version 5 and it did not return until version 12.1. Tables and charts pasted from Numbers are automatically updated if the original spreadsheet is changed.

Compatibility

Pages can import some

Microsoft Word Microsoft Word is a word processor program, word processing program developed by Microsoft. It was first released on October 25, 1983, under the name Multi-Tool Word for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other platf ...

documents (including Word 2007's

Office Open XML Office Open XML (also informally known as OOXML) is a zipped, XML-based file format developed by Microsoft for representing spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing documents. Ecma International standardized the initial version ...

format). Pages 4 and earlier could also import AppleWorks word processing documents, and export documents to rich text, but those features were removed in Pages 5.0 and not restored until Pages 6.1. Pages 5 can still export files in

PDF Portable document format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe Inc., Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, computer hardware, ...

EPUB EPUB is an e-book file format that uses the ".epub" file extension. The term is short for ''electronic publication'' and is sometimes stylized as ''ePUB''. EPUB is supported by many e-readers, and compatible software is available for most smart ...

, and Microsoft Word DOC formats. Simple and complex mathematical equations can be written for a Pages document with macOS's Grapher, offering similar capabilities to Microsoft Equation Editor (plus 2D and 3D rendering tools only Grapher can use). As of January 2015, Pages does not support

OpenDocument The Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF), also known as OpenDocument, standardized as ISO 26300, is an open file format for word processor, word processing documents, spreadsheets, Presentation program, presentations and ...

file format A file format is a Computer standard, standard way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file. It specifies how bits are used to encode information in a digital storage medium. File formats may be either proprietary format, pr ...

. The only software other than Pages that can open its files are Apple's

productivity suite through Apple's iCloud,

LibreOffice LibreOffice () is a free and open-source office productivity software suite developed by The Document Foundation (TDF). It was created in 2010 as a fork of OpenOffice.org, itself a successor to StarOffice. The suite includes applications ...

, and Jumpshare. Windows users can view and edit Pages files using iWork for iCloud via a

web browser A web browser, often shortened to browser, is an application for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's scr ...

. The iCloud system can also read Microsoft Word files and convert Pages files to Microsoft Word format. Jumpshare can view Pages files. Other than accessing iCloud through a browser, no program can officially view or edit a Pages file using

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

. Some content can be retrieved from a document created in Pages '09 because a .pages file is a bundle. A user can open a .pages file in an unpackaging program or by renaming files as .zip files in Windows (XP and onwards) and will find either a .jpg or .pdf preview in its entirety for viewing and printing, although this is only possible if the creator of the .pages files elected to include a preview. The user will also find a .xml file with unformatted text. This process can also be used for users of the 2008 version of Pages to open documents saved in the 2009 version of Pages, which are not backward compatible. Pages can also export documents into several formats; formatting is generally retained during the export process.

Version history

References

External links