How to emulate Word tables behaviour in Pages

Question

I am trying to create a document which has the text of a book in English in the left column of each page and the same text in Japanese in the right column. I want the beginning of each paragraph to align with the beginning of each corresponding paragraph in the other language.
I was doing this in Word previously, but because I'm in the beta program, Word (2011 beta) starts to freak out with documents over about 300 pages. In Word, I did it by having a 2-column table, using a single row for each chapter. I then used line breaks to align the paragraphs within a chapter.
Is there any way to get similar functionality in Pages? I tried doing it with a table (by importing the .docx I had been working on) but Pages only shows one row per page, hiding all the text in any row which doesn't fit on a single page. Can I make column rows flow over more than one page?
I also tried working with text boxes, but they are such a clunky solution and it seems (unless I'm missing a trick) that I'd have to manually put new text boxes in the same position on each page, then manually create the link between each one.
Many thanks

Answer 1

Blahah404 wrote:
As I understand it I can use Applescript to interact with Pages, is this correct? If so, is it possible to write a script which creates a new table row and fills it with content overflowing from the previous row, ad infinitum until all the content is visible in successive rows? It seems strange that there would be no tool available for this functionality.
You may feel that it's strange.
What is sure is that there is no such a feature.
The support of tables in AppleScript is really short :
just a command allowing us to create a table with a given contents, with or without a header row or/and a header column.
no provision to rule columns widths, rows heights.
I built a small script able to extract the contents of a table but at this time, I found no way to edit them.
tell application "System Events" to set (UI elements enabled) to true
tell application "Pages"
activate
set table_name to "Table 1"
tell document "Sans titre 3"
set window_name to name
set existing_graphics to name of every graphic
if existing_graphics does not contain table_name then
add table data {{"Year", "Mac", "iPad"}, ¬
{2009, 100, 0}, {2010, 200, 220}} with header column and header row
end if
-- get properties of every graphic
set name of graphic 1 to table_name
end tell -- document
end tell -- application Pages
Now we use GUI scripting
tell application "System Events" to tell application process "Pages"
tell table table_name of UI element 1 of group 1 of UI element 1 of scroll area 1 of splitter group 1 of window window_name
-- get every attribute
get properties of attribute "AXRowCount"
-- {class:attribute, name:"AXRowCount", value:3, settable:false}
(* We can get the Row Count but we can't change it *)
tell first static text of UI element 2 of row 2
get properties
get attributes
get properties of attribute "AXFocused"
-- {class:attribute, name:"AXFocused", value:false, settable:false}
(* We can get the value but we can't change it *)
get properties of attribute "AXEnabled"
-- {class:attribute, name:"AXEnabled", value:false, settable:false}
(* We can get the value but we can't change it *)
get properties of attribute "AXSelectedText"
-- {class:attribute, name:"AXSelectedText", value:missing value, settable:false}
(* We can get the value but we can't change it *)
get properties of attribute "AXSelectedTextRange"
-- {class:attribute, name:"AXSelectedTextRange", value:missing value, settable:false}
(* We can get the value but we can't change it *)
get properties of attribute "AXValue"
-- {class:attribute, name:"AXValue", value:"100", settable:false}
(* We can get the value but we can't change it *)
end tell -- first static…
end tell -- table…
end tell
With such tool, I feel that it's difficult to achieve your goal.
It's why I responded :
If this doesn't fit your needs, you must use an other tool.
Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) dimanche 11 juillet 2010 18:03:07