Pages: where documents go for typos
When you create a new document in Pages, the app allows you to pick from one of 16 different templates. The templates range from pretty standard word processing to page layouts for posters and thank-you cards.
While Keynote can only be run in landscape mode, Pages can run in either portrait or landscape. When held in landscape orientation, just the page and the keyboard are displayed, delegating the app primarily to text entry duty. The majority of the app's features and functionality can only be accessed in portrait mode. The main document area can be zoomed in, just like a Keynote presentation, up to 200 percent, and moved by dragging it with a single finger.
There are two major UI elements of Pages: the toolbar and the ruler. The majority of basic text formatting happens on the ruler. Selecting text isn’t easy—it would be much easier with an actual keyboard with arrow keys. You can make text bold, italic, or underlined, or change the alignment of the text. You can also manually enter a tab, line break, column break, or page break. Apple has a number of presets for text, including styles such as title, headings, bullets, and captions. You can adjust margins and indentations by dragging stops on the ruler back and forth.
The toolbar in Pages isn’t all that different from Keynote; the only changes are that there's a “full screen” button and a document setup option inside the tools icon. Everything else is largely the same, with a few tweaks here and there. You can select how you want to wrap text around objects, and you can add up to four columns and change line spacing.
The document setup portion of the tools section allows you to edit the template of the open document. This is done with an interesting, blueprint-styled interface. The size of the page can be switched between A4 and letter, but there is no way to change the aspect of the page, although some users have found ways to get around this limitation. From this screen, you can edit the header and footer that displays on the page, and change the size of the editable area. You can also add text or images that appear on every page of the document.
The main problem I found with Pages is that there are no arrow keys on the iPad's keyboard. I find highlighting text, copying and pasting, and other forms of text manipulation to be infuriating on the iPad. It isn’t that it's a bad system—it’s probably as good as it can be, given that the device relies entirely on touch. An external keyboard would make the application better, but at that point you're practically carrying around a laptop wherever you go. The iPad, a keyboard, and Pages could make a decent word processor for a kid, but with the abundance of cheap laptops, desktops, and older machines that can do the same thing for cheaper, it’s hard to justify the cost.