There Are No Frickin’ Cross References in Apple’s Pages?
We’re spending the weekend putting the final touches on our ebook, and planning our marketing push. I’m doing the final layout work on the book, and one of the last things on my list is adding cross references. You know, sentences like “for more information on Facebook, see page 46″. We’re using Pages 2.0, part of Apple’s iWork ‘08 suite. I started clicking around the menus to finding the cross reference functionality, and couldn’t. You know why?
Pages doesn’t offer cross references.
I am seriously underwhelmed. Cross references are a pretty basic feature for word processor software. After all, Microsoft Word has had them for about 15 years. Apple wants me to use Pages to make “newsletters, reports, proposals”, but they want me to hard code the frickin’ page numbers?
It’s not an enormous pain now, but it will cause serious angst every time we update the book. Once we introduce a few paragraphs of new content, every cross reference will be wrong.
I’m extra disappointed because Pages has otherwise proved an excellent, reliable tool with few bugs, and a real improvement on alternatives MS Word (on reliability) and Framemaker (on usability).
December 8th, 2007 at 2:43 pm
That’s an amazing omission. There’s a feature request!
December 8th, 2007 at 6:51 pm
P.S. You can send feature requests at the Apple website.
December 9th, 2007 at 12:22 am
I’d avoid cross-references. Tech writers use them all the time, but it’s actually annoying for the reader when the writer says “here’s something really interesting…oops flip to the other end of the book for the details.” Maybe Apple knows this?
December 9th, 2007 at 2:06 am
Derek: Thanks for that, but I’m afraid Apple doesn’t inspire much confidence as the sort of company that responds to feature requests. They’re great at a lot of stuff, but I don’t feel submitting feature requests to them is worth the effort.
Kevin: Yeah, I’m removing most of them simply because I don’t want them to be wrong in the future.
December 10th, 2007 at 2:48 am
Damn… I’m in the same boat you’re in. I’ll look at the Bookmark feature before considering switching to Word.
God I miss FrameMaker on the Mac.
May 7th, 2008 at 11:12 pm
Pages does support cross referencing. The app calls it “bookmarks”. Select some text, bookmark it. Then create a link. Just did it earlier today.
Also, Pages will automatically number your pages too.
September 24th, 2008 at 12:25 am
BOOKMARKS ARE NOT IDENTICAL WITH CROSS REFERENCES!!!
September 26th, 2008 at 10:31 pm
Bookmarks are just hyperlinks within in the document itself. They have very limited use. A cross reference pulls the page number or article number and can be used to reference another place in the document. Apple has added a very bare bones TOC which does pull the page numbers in, but only for TOC’s.
I am with Darren. Until Apple adds this functionality I will stay with my old version of Word for anything but short one off documents I do at home.