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Comment by ch_sm | Hacker News Reader

Pages is an underrated Word Processor. It has the lessons of 30 years of development and experimentation of WYSIWYG editors distilled and applied in a tight little package.

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The same goes for Preview.app - it's a very underrated, super powerful app for PDF editing and lots of other stuff.

It arguably gets worse with every OS X iteration. I understand why they removed postscript support, but it still makes me sad.

But it can still do a lot.

My pet peeve is that every single time you click any web link in PDFs, you have to confirm via a dialog that you want to visit a link. You used to just be able to click links.

I’ve never seen that, I use Safari. My nit about PDFs is pages that download the PDF rather than view them within the browser.

For me, it's about 30% of my pdfs just showing blank/white pages... when I drag them to a Firefox tab, they render perfectly. It's Preview, not the pdf that's the problem.

It's been screwed up since Lion I think, if that was the one where they played with the idea of "people don't have to save anymore", still decent but has some dumb bits of friction in the main flows from the mistakes of that idea.

The iOS version is straight up trash though if you're trying to work with multiple PDFs like bank statements on iOS.

It does have a lot of polish. I'm just a bit sore that it no longer supports PostScript.

All the original apps / utilities in old OSX were surprisingly powerful given their simple interfaces. Network Utility, Image Capture, etc just did the things. I remember pointing out to my father (on his first Mac) that we were eschewing HP's drivers and using what Apple built right into the OS. I don't think it had the impact on him that it had on me.

Love using it to make white bits transparent. The tool also exists in Keynote but is more powerful in Preview. It's the second tool from the left in the editing toolbar.

The team that created Pages, before that they were GoBe Productive for BeOS, and before that Clarris, so Pages is their 3rd or 4th redesign from scratch.

My main issue with Pages is that it doesn't allow plugins like Word does. I'm a heavy Zotero user so a lack of Zotero plugin means I can't use Pages for anything meaningful.

There is an Endnote plugin. Google tells me it is developed by Apple, so the plug-in interface isn’t published, and it also may be limited to that single use case, but that’s a (probably tiny) lead towards writing one.

I am aware of Endnote plugin but my entire library is on Zotero. I have close to 20K papers there as of today and it's constantly expanding, so I can't move to Endnote. Besides that I am a lifelong supporter of Zotero.

Let me rephrase that: Pages has a door that allows an EndNote plugin to do things inside Pages. That door may be locked and it may not lead to (all) the stuff you want, but if you’re looking for a door, I would start there. Maybe, it is open or can be pried open.

Thanks for clarifying that. I will explore this further.

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