Stone Design Forums

Create works so great opening MS Word documents, showing all the formatting and layout, but it won't display any clip art or images in the document. Why? I surely wish it would so that I could stop using icWord, which only works about 20% of the time.

Basically because Create is a layout app (graphics and text are separate objects - think flow around, etc...)

FREE WORKAROUND: Open the .DOC in Apple's TextEdit, drag the images into Create, then drag in the Text (You can just drop in the .doc as you figured out to get just the text).

Also - for a complete suite of M$ apps - check out http://www.neooffice.org

TextEdit won't display the images either. I've tried every piece of software I have to get these files to display with images, and nothing has worked consistently ... UNTIL NOW ... drum roll, please ... NeoOffice is the answer! Thank you for the tip. I had downloaded OpenOffice, but couldn't get it to work with that X11 thing. It wouldn't open at all. I didn't know that NeoOffice existed. It opens all these Word files and displays the images.

Realize that the apps you've been talking about (Create, TextEdit) use the same .doc "interpreter," the one built in Tiger. Even Pages uses this. It has gotten better since 10.3, but it's still not complete. It works very well for text documents, but when you have tables or graphics, the limits start to show.

NeoOffice works quite well most of the time, the biggest issue I have is that once in a while the text flow isn't quite right. The Aqua beta is getting pretty cool, where you get real OS X Open and Save dialogs. Hopefully they'll get the interface details right and we'll have something!

Pages has its own .doc interpreter and it's good, very good. It also handles .png images correctly which Create and Neo Office do not, there is a loss of clarity/resolution. (I'll send Andrew a screen grab)

The latest version of Neo Office Aqua has an image rotate bug which means the image orientation may be wrong. (Neo Office 2 Aqua beta 3 patch 2) I use the spread sheet in Neo Office most days and so far it has performed perfectly, been completely stable and imported from Excel without a hitch. I tried Mesa but was not impressed.

Apple included some great features in Pages which they did not make available to other developers to use, the best .doc interpreter, a Table tool that works, a simple spread sheet, Address Book fields and better text support.

I've covered the .doc interpreter, very very good.

The Table Tool is easy to use, outputs to a web page correctly, is easily adjusted and can combine cells.

The simple spread sheet allows you to add formulae to cells and is simple and easy to use. I use this for invoicing and statements.

Address Book Fields are great you just put the fields you want to use say in a template. Then when you open a new document from the template you can drag an entry from your Address Book to your Pages document and the fields are filled in for you. Elegant simple and fast. I use this every day and include invoice address and delivery address plus company name and phone number, It's a great time saver and it makes me keep my Address Book up to date.

Text support is much improved in Pages, one thing I use a lot is Hard and Soft returns (a hard return is a normal return and a soft return is shift and return). A hard return indicates a new paragraph a soft return does not. If you display the effectors or non printing characters they have a different symbol. This simple idea means it is very easy to select your entire document and set your before and after paragraph spacing and make your document look just right quickly.

These are all things I think Apple should have made available to Cocoa programers but sadly did not.

Consequently I have a copy of Pages and use it most days.
I also have a copy of Neo Office, mainly for the spread sheet and use it most days.
Of course I have a copy of Create and use it a lot you can't beat it for Page Layout.

The features listed above I use daily and could not do without. I would like to see them incorporated into Create but this is a lot of work and may not suit everyone so if you have a view post a reply it helps Andrew.

I hope this helps, Mark.

Thanks for that info, Mark. I (clearly) did not know that about Pages.

This is semi off topic, but not unrelated.

I'm using another lesser-known word processor/spreadsheet/database suite called Papyrus 12.

The big claim to fame for Papyrus is that it can save hybrid PDF files that are universally viewable as PDFs but are also directly editable by Papyrus. In essence, the PDFs contain a 'layer' of the Papyrus document code.

I'm a heavy user of DEVONthink and the Papyrus hybrid PDFs are completely compatible with my database for searching and analyzing text, and can be opened back up in Papyrus for editing with a click.

Im on a project right now that involves creating dozens of PDF documents and posting them for review. The hybrid files are great for fast edits and re-posting.

Hi, Andrew. Just wanted to note that Papyrus trick to you. It suddenly makes Papyrus documents far more "universal".

Create has had the ability to embed itself into PDF for about 5 years now

See Preferences -> Document -> "Put Create(R) into PDF"

When you drop a PDF with Create in it back into Create, it's fully editable.

Hi, Andrew: I've had my preferences set that way. But when I open a PDF previously exported by Create I can't edit the text or images of the PDF as though I had opened the native Create document. Are you saying that I should be able to do that?

By contrast, when I open a hybrid PDF under Papyrus 12 the file is treated as a native Papyrus file, so I can immediately edit text, images, tables or any other element of the document. For example, I could change the text layout from 1-column to 2-column, or vice versa, insert new text or images, whatever.

Sure if "Use Create from PDF" is also checked!