Friday iFAQ: Pagehand
Every Friday we publish a list of inFrequently Answered Questions and answers to help you, the Crazy Apple user, get more out of your Crazy Apple products.
This week we bring you the master of typography: Pagehand.1
Q: I hate Word!
A: Word.
Q: Right.
A: What?
Q: I said I hate Word, you said “Word”, and I assumed that you were just agreeing with me.
A: Ah, right.
Q: So, do you have an answer?
A: Did you ask a question?
Q: Would you like me to ask a question?
A: Do you want to explain why you hate Word?
Q: …Yeah. Okay, I hate Word because it does stupid things to innocent text. I mean, why should I have to dig for six miles in piles to change styles?
A: So you can re-style your file?
Q: Yes, you imbecile!
A: Now you’re getting puerile.
Q: And you’re using a dictionary. Stop it. So, to sum up: I hate Word because it makes things I write ugly and makes it hard to make things pretty. Do you have a solution to my problem? An answer to my question? A Bonnie to my Clyde?
A: That last one didn’t really fit.
Q: Noted. Are you going to answer me?
A: Pagehand.
Q:What?
A: You want your document to look perfect, you want text that flows cleanly across the page, and you want to be able to style your document without a climbing harness and a pick axe, right?
Q: Right.
A: Pagehand. Pagehand is your solution! It’s simple, clean, has contextual menus that make sense and only appear when needed, and it’s almost insanely focused on how your document will look. It’s native file format is PDF, so you know that your documents will look the same no matter where you send them, PC, Mac, or Linux.
Q: Great! Now I can finally re-style that text box on the third page of my great new novel-slash-programming manual!
A: Whoa, hold up there, hoss. Pagehand don’t do no textboxes. Yet, anyway.
Q: Wait, what? Why?
A: Where? Who? When?
Q: Kindly explain.
A: Pagehand is new, and made by one guy who believes that we should make pretty documents, but he’s still one guy and needs a bit of time and support before he can get his product to be all that you can be.
Q: So he wants me to pay for beta software?
A: No, he wants you to pay for 1.0 software, and he wants you to pay 20% less for 1.0 software than you would for 1.1 software. It’s a fair deal. I mean, look what Microsoft wants you to pay for.
Q: Fair enough.
A: Be sure to read the section of the help file called “Producing Beautiful Documents”. It will change your life.
Q: Ummm…
A: Once you read about the true way of document design you will not want to stray from it again. Indeed, in purity, and only in purity of design is there safety from the evils of Times New Roman. Live it, love it, be it; the good design for the ages. Amen.
Q: Okay! Well, thank you for your time. I gotta go now. Bye!
A: Return you will, when more training you need, yes. MmmMMMmmmm.
- Once again, I’m writing an iFAQ for software that I genuinely like, and hope to someday purchase. These aren’t usually my funniest. You have been warned. [↩]
It looks pretty nice, but since I’m a graphic designer and typographer, I use QuarkXPress and InDesign, which do everything one could want for text and layout. (I even have FrameMaker, but it runs only under Classic.)
And for people who don’t need all that the professional apps offer, Pages is no slouch.
Still, it’s nice that someone is looking out for the aesthetes who just need a beautiful word processing program.
Well, I still use Apple Works altho I do have Pages. Maybe I should check this out.
Hi Nate, thanks for the writeup! Email me and I will send you a license coupon.
Ross Carter, developer of Pagehand