Pages can access the pictures, songs, and movies that you already have on your computer-probably in iPhoto, iTunes, and iMovie-and give you the freedom to include these elements within a Pages document. Digital media convergence is a reality and the kinds of documents people want to create now are stylishly laid out, colorful, and filled with photos ( Figure 4-1). Photographs, artwork, movies, and music are just a click away on your computer. Its page-layout abilities set Pages apart from other word processors what’s causing the program’s well-deserved buzz is the incredible ease with which you can produce professional-looking layouts.Īpple’s software designers realized that the plain text document age is waning. But now it’s time for Pages to step into the spotlight and reveal its other, flashier persona. The preceding chapters treated Pages like it was just a hot new word processing program, which, of course, it is. Yes it takes getting used to and even after a few hours you are still discovering options you did not see before, but it's the best I've seen at what it does.Chapter 4. Moving Beyond Text: Laying Out Pages It's shareware, but if you need this sort of tool, the 30$ are more than well spent. This is a Graphic Converter and by name and by nature, it is all that. Sure it's not Photoshop, or Corel, or PaintShop, but then again it was never meant to be. Unintuitive and still bearing remnants of old Classic interface elements, unsuited for photo manipulation, and a bit simplistic in looks.īest image conversion tool I have ever used, it puts everything else to shame in this aspect. It's fast and reliable and gets the job done. It has every format you can imagine and 60-70 more. Unparalleled image format conversion capabilities. Last but not least you have the ability to save with/without preview icons and resource forks for web purposes. For formats that support compression, you can fiddle with the setting in real time and it gives you a preview as well as a file size. During this I got to see the save dialogue which is another hidden gem. And you know what? They were all perfect, and looked the same everywhere. So I proceeded to convert from one image format to another and opened them up in as many other programs as I could find. Most high-end editing programs are notorious for their, personalized approach to transparency and alpha channels and the way they are interpreted. The convert and modify interface is a reminder of days long gone and classic interfaces, unintuitive and strange after all these years of OSX but it's functional and you can get the job done.Īs a last test I messed around with 32 bit images. Now, the batch functions were my next stop and along the way I discovered an integrated image browser, not the best out there, but not the worst either. It hosts many other standard options common to this type of program including some effects and filters although few are really useful and some are just strange like the Color Permutation and Color Blindness. Resizing is also very good but it lacks the possibility to choose a pin point around which to scale. You can change bit depth and it offers a most functional option for minimizing the color table of an image in order to decrease its size. But then you open the menus and it starts to get heavy. Also, support for multiple layers in clunky and intuitive as is working with Alpha channels. In terms of image manipulation, it does offer a clone and stamp tool which function similar to those found in Photoshop, but obviously less impressive. Most of these are strange and obscure and I have never heard of them before, but it sure feels good to know they are there.Īt a first glance over the look of the program, it resembles Paint, with filled and non-filled square, rectangle and circle buttons in its tool bar. The file type list alone takes 3-4 seconds to scroll through at max speed, and it can save in 38 different formats. It can import a staggering 96 different image formats. This program might seem redundant to those who have never used it before, but it is not. Graphic Converter was built to do one thing, and yes, you've guessed it, it's to convert images. Nothing fancy, nothing spectacular, clear and succinct.
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