I’m test driving Skrivener and imported all my chapters. I compiled manuscript into RTF to see how it looks. I opened the RTF in textedit and in Pages but there are no inserted page breaks. The WORD export puts them where they belong, but I hate Word. What am I doing wrong?
You’re doing nothing wrong. In TextEdit, you need to switch to “Wrap to Page” mode in the Format menu.
And then, if you don’t mind, please let Apple know that you would like Pages to better support the RTF format:
Because I’m afraid the fault lies with Pages. Pages imports RTF, but it will ignore footnotes, comments, headers and footers, images and page breaks. The only formats Pages properly supports (other than its own custom .pages format of course) are .doc and .docx. Unfortunately, there is no way for anyone outside of Apple to support the .pages format directly, and .doc and .docx are very difficult to support too. Apple provides developers with standard importers/exporters for .doc and .docx, but these importers/exporters do not support images, footnotes etc (they use a different, much better importer/exporter for .doc and .docx in Pages, but a worse one for RTF). On the other hand, RTF is a standard and open format supported by all versions of Word and all major word processors except for Pages, and it is much easier for lone developers such as myself to support it.
So I’m afraid that at this time, as nice as Pages is, it’s really only useful as a way of creating standalone documents or exchanging documents with Word users - it’s not great for integrating into a workflow with other programs unless you only want the most basic of features.
Please do take the time to ask Apple for better RTF support and explain why, though - I’m hoping that enough people ask, they may improve the RTF support in the future, although I’m not holding my breath.
There are other great word processor alternatives on the Mac, though, such as Nisus Writer (which uses RTF as its default format) and Mellel. And there are free alternatives for more basic documents (no footnotes or comments) such as Bean.
All the best,
Keith
Thanks for the reply. I made the suggestion to Apple. Weird about FTP support. That seems like a total no-brainer.