Inadequate and impoverished because Apple keeps it that way – Pages Review

25 years ago I had a Mac Quadra 800; it had a blazing 33-MHz processor and a massive 500MB of storage. On it I used Word 5.1 for Mac, which was a lovely program before Word 6 became bloatware. Word 5.1 on that machine could anything that this version of Pages can do and more. Eventually, I got a new Mac (I forget which one) and needed a replacement for Word (the then-current version remaining bloatware), so I got iWorks (or was it still Claris?); the predecessor to Pages was fine, and the drawing program was lovely. Then Apple upgraded the word processor to Pages — and it really was an upgrade — but alas lost the lovely drawing program. Pages for the Mac really used to be a quality 5-star program, while the iPhone and iPad versions were inadequate. Then someone at Apple decided to make them identical, not by improving the iVersions but by emasculating the Mac version. The iVersions remain inadequate. They still aren’t identical. Here are some of the things missing from the iVersion of Pages: Set a default font other than the criminally-ugly Helvetica (the Swiss should be ashamed); Insert a Layout break; Control character spacing; Find without having to find Find; Find-and-replace; Replace All; Replace with a carriage-return/Paragraph. And those are just what I needed TODAY. A comprehensive list would be quite long.
Review by HansG on Pages.