I have been using Apple's iWork for about a week. I think it makes a great low-end page layout program. I have done a few little things with it including an emergency church bulletin, the person doing it is on vacation and they wanted changes and I was able to whip out a good looking one in an hour and a half. But I had a problem I couldn't get rid of the headers and footers to open up more space on the page and make the fonts bigger so it would be easy for the older folks to read.
I didn't have time to search for an answer then but I did some searching since and found some good ideas that combined into something that works.
You can't actually turn headers and footers off, but you can get into the Inspector>Document and change the margins. First, set the header and footer margins to 0 in, that gets them out of the way. Then you can change the other margins to 0.5 in or whatever you want and you are all set.
I separate the idea creation and the presentation of the ideas to help me focus on each part. I prefer VoodooPad or even TextEdit for getting the words down. They are fast and since they don't do more then the most basic text handling bold, italics, etc I am forced to concentrate on the ideas I am trying to present. Rather then the flashy bits of which font, how big, pretty pictures, how many columns, and all that, which I can do now very nicely in Pages.
It will be interesting to see how Pages evolves. Pages is not InDesign or Express, but it is powerful enough for me to do all kinds of things that I couldn't do otherwise. It is too bad for Adobe and Quark they seem to have gotten out of the low-end market and it looks like Apple has moved in there. I consider Pages more of a low-end page layout app then a word processor.
It is interesting to think about because I have read a number of stories of when the big steel companies gave up the low-end to the mini-mills who could only produce low quality rebar. But it did not take long for those mini-mills to learn how to produce better quality rebar and then they keep getting better and started bring out new products and eventually pushed the big mills into bankruptcy.
Apple doesn't seem to be trying to take out the big guys, they are just filling in the voids the big guys have left behind. Microsoft pretty much stopped development on Internet Explorer long before Apple had to make Safari. Adobe hadn't done much with Premiere, or whatever low-end video editing package they had, for a while so Apple had to make iMovie. Now the same thing is happening with page layout, Apple has moved into the void at the low end that other companies had moved out of.
iMovie wasn't much of a threat to Adobe but Final Cut Pro is now giving Avid a run for the money. Pages is no InDesign but in 5 years it will be a much different story.
If I was a large business I would seriously consider creating a product division specifically charged with keeping a completive presence in the low-end market.
