transfer footnotes to iWork Pages, any hope?

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
1

I have downloaded iWork 09 to test it for using it in layout for my master thesis. In many ways I have tried to get footnotes to work. And I never get them as real footnotes, just as “dead” endnotes, that do not respond to any adjustments. In the help menu list over popular writing programs, it seems that footnotes are not supported between Scrivener and Pages. Can this be confirmed, or is there any hope? It would be fantastic to combine those two programs for a perfect result. But I guess I have to involve Microsoft… :wink:

Thanks for any suggestions.

sverremac :slight_smile:

2

This is not an answer to you question exactly, but maybe my input can help somehow…

When doing my PhD (in archaeology) I tried several word processors where to edit the final version. From all (Word, Pages, Nisus Writer Pro and Mellel) only NWP and Mellel behaved well enough for my standards — meaning being fast, doing a good job w/ table of contents, interacting with my bibliography app (Sente), doing footnotes and endnotes. As for Word it only excelled on doing tables and interacting with the only MS program that I still use (and like): Excel.

I finished by using NWP since it has a more friendly use approach. Nowadays, I use Pages to do posters and flyers (great!), NWP for big editing works and Bean/WriteRoom for small texts. Oh, and Scrivener is always a must on any writing project before editing.

3

Hi,

The only way - as you guessed - is to export to RTF, open that in Word, and save from Word as .doc or .docx and then open that in Pages.

The reason, by the way, is this:

DOC and DOCX are incredibly complex formats, the former binary (ouch) and the latter a complicated XML format. Although MS make the formats available, it would take a single programmer such as myself a good year to write an importer/exporter for these formats. I thus rely on Apple’s built-in DOC and DOCX exporters, the same ones as are used by TextEdit and many other Mac apps. However, as Apple’s standard TextEdit text system doesn’t have support for footnotes or comments, neither do these importers/exporters (they have other problems too). And there is no way for me just hack in support for footnotes to the existing importers/exporters.

RTF is a much more open standard, as it is essentially plain text with markup. It is also fully supported by any version of Word and many other word processors, including Nisus Writer (which uses it as its default format) and Mellel. Scrivener can import and export RTF very well, incorporating footnotes, images, headers and footers and comments. However, Pages has really, really poor support for RTF. It is, in fact, the only major word processor without decent RTF support to the best of my knowledge.

The .pages format itself is a black box. Apple do not make the format available to third-party developers and have stated that it is never likely to become available; nor do they provide developers with any importers/exporters for the format. So only Apple can create programs that support the .pages format. (It was the same with AppleWorks - they provided developers with importers and exporters for Microsoft formats, but not for AppleWorks.)

By far the best solution would be for Apple to improve RTF support in Pages. If I was able to take Apple’s standard RTF importers and exporters and add support for footnotes, images etc to them, then the Pages team should be able to do it in a day or two. Seriously, it would be trivial for them so I have no idea why they have so far omitted to provide proper support for the format.

Please consider leaving Apple some feedback about this here, preferably asking them to improve their RTF import and export. Point out to them that you are probably going to have to use a different word processor because of this lack.

apple.com/feedback/pages.html

Without decent RTF support, Pages pretty much positions itself as a program good for exchanging documents with Word and not much else, which is a great shame.

I second the recommendation for Nisus - its fast, reliable and has great RTF support.

All the best,
Keith

4

Thanks a lot, Keith, for such a long and good answer!

I did try to use RTF via Words, but I did not store in Word, I just copied and pasted further. Now, when I did as you said, stored in Word, and then imported to Pages, I got my real, living footnotes under every page in Pages. (It also works when I store and open the document i NeoOffice again.) And I’m happy! Even if it involves an operation extra. So thank you very much!

It seems that Apple has still not fully come to the level at the “office” side, as a part of the old division between the (Apple) artists and the (MS) office people. A division that should not any more need to exist, as Scrivener is a very good example of. :slight_smile: I do really hope Apple do their good part in getting their standards to work fully. Very strange that they hold back on RTF support in Pages, now as Apple more and more is preferred. Why should we be forced to use Office, when we don’t need to?

I will consider to give apple some feedback on this. But I have the solution to get “living” footnotes into Pages now. That was the most important. :slight_smile:

Thanks also to valente.mac for your suggestions! :slight_smile:

Sverremac

5

@ sverremac: as far as Pages and footnotes are concerned, there is one thing you should keep in mind: Pages isn’t able to produce footnotes that span across more than one page. In documents with numerous and / or long footnotes, this limitation sometimes has very negative consequences for the layout of the document.

@ keith: I’m sorry I have to contradict you, but it’s simply not true that Nisus is a fast wordprocessor. On the contrary: in my experience (and in that of many others) Nisus documents with many footnotes become almost unworkably slow. This is one of the weakest sides of Nisus, which makes it (at least in its present version) unfit for documents of this kind.

Mellel does a much, much better job in this respect.

6

I have to admit I haven’t used Nisus for documents with many footnotes, as I don’t require footnotes for my own work much these days (my last academic work was several years ago :slight_smile: ), so I’ll have to bow to the judgements of others on that one. What have the guys at Nisus got to say about this? My experience of them is that they are very helpful and strive to make Nisus the best it can be, and the developers are very friendly and helpful.

All the best,
Keith

7

Thanks Timotheus. My footnotes are at least this time mostly onliners, referrals to literature, and not too many. And I don’t like when footnotes gets divided between two pages. But still Pages should have the full flexebility. I hope Apple can be brave and take the full step into word processing, there is no reason they should still hold back in details as this.

8

@ keith: the slowing down of Nisus in documents with many footnotes is admitted by Martin himself (see here), who doesn’t suggest any solution. So it may be assumed that in the present version of NWP a solution for this problem simply doesn’t exist.

9

Thanks for the link. I see that Martin only became aware of it last month, so I’m sure they’ll work on it now that they know the problem exists. Not that it helps you right now, of course, but my experience of them is that they are very active in trying to fix these things. Although as it’s a layout slowdown, and as they use the OS X text system (albeit a very heavily customised version of it), I can well imagine it taking them some time to fix this, as the OS X text system’s layout routines can be very tricky and obtuse (Mellel uses a text system they wrote from the ground up - kudos to the Redlers brothers for that).

All the best,
Keith

10

Just found out that I don’t necessary need to go the way via “compile draft” and specify RTF. I can copy and paste the writing of a document directly into NeoOffice. But then it’s important to store as doc. Then I can import the document into Pages. There I can mark all the footnotes at once, to change layout and size. That is not impossible with my NeoOffice, but I guess it is in newer versions of Office.

sverremac