introducing myself

[ssviri]

I am rather new to iPad - have been using it for about a week and am excited having it. Each day I get a better hang of things. But there are, obviously, many open questions. I am particularly interested in getting advice re Pages. I started using it for writing more than just notes but I miss certain features familiar to me from MS Word: for example, inserting special characters (diacritical points etc.). Could you refer, me, please to a manual or website where I can learn about these and other specific wordprocessing features?
Many thanks,
Sara (ssviri)

 

[Tim SPRACKLEN]

Great to hear from you and welcome to the Forum.

Probably the best source of advice for using Pages and the other Apple programs - Numbers and Keynote - is their help site

Have a look here...

http://help.apple.com/iwork/1.3/mobile/interface/index.html#tan724868a9

Enjoy your iPad and we hope to hear more from you soon.

Tim
Scotland

 

[iPadOhana]

Welcome...The learning curve is great with the iPad...But conversely, the more you learn, the more you start wanting to play more and the potential is limitless with what you can do with this little sexy thing...At least that's my perspective..

 

[Tim SPRACKLEN]

I am rather new to iPad - have been using it for about a week and am excited having it. Each day I get a better hang of things. But there are, obviously, many open questions. I am particularly interested in getting advice re Pages. I started using it for writing more than just notes but I miss certain features familiar to me from MS Word: for example, inserting special characters (diacritical points etc.). Could you refer, me, please to a manual or website where I can learn about these and other specific wordprocessing features?
Many thanks,
Sara (ssviri)

Regarding ‘diacritical points’ you may have some difficulty with ‘Pages’. It’s very much a ‘stripped down’ word processor and has only a sub-set of MS Word’s capability. I have found ‘workarounds’ for some of these issues, but they’re not very elegant. I’ve found that Pages can display characters and styles that there is no facility within the app itself to insert. For example, even basic formatting - such as superscript and subscript - cannot be directly inserted from within Pages. But you can cut and paste them from a document imported from MS Word! So the very ugly workaround is to produce a document that has all the special characters etc that you need and import that into Pages ‘My Documents’, where it keeps all your work. Now you can simply cut-and-paste into any document you’re trying to author. In the case of superscripts and subscripts, for example, it’s only necessary to keep a single example because once you’ve imported it, you can edit it to whatever particular superscript or subscript you want! Just place the cursor immediately behind the superscript or subscript, backspace through it (i.e. deleting it) and then type the character(s) that you want to superscript or subscript. Yes, you can type as many as you want. In fact, bizarrely, the ‘difficulty’ is getting back to normal text, so you have to have inserted the originally cut-and-pasted superscript or subscript into the middle of some ‘regular’ text.

Tim
Scotland