When will iPad Pages offer styles?

Question

What's happening to Pages people — programmers and staff — at Apple? Aren't they interested in all the writers of the world to buy an iPad with Pages? You could easily cause this to happen if only you did the following:
Any writer will love what you offer today:
-- The super clear and sharp iPad 3 screen
-- Pages opens exactly where the writer left the document
-- All documents are safely and automatically stored in the iCloud
-- The feeling of the Apple Aluminum Keyboard is simply of the highest quality.
A computer, for a writer, for a real writer, becomes absolutely obsolete with tablets, like the iPad 3 or similar ones. Who needs the clumsy power draining notebook or desktop? They have become effectively a thing of the past, especially for writers.
However, they lack one thing that makes them unusable: Pages doesn't know about STYLES. That's right: PAGES doesn't know about STYLES!
When you export your pages documents, what you thought were styles have become paragraphs with different formatting parameters, but no styles or style definitions.
How is such a handicap possible? Please, BRING STYLES to the Pages of the iPad!!!!!
And teach iPad3 Pages to export in UTF-8!
And extend the functionality of Pages on the iPad with a DOCUMENT NAVIGATOR, something that will make it possible for you to move from heading (h1, h2, h3) to heading!
Please, do this soon! Or you will make us believe that you don't want WRITERS to adopt the iPad completely!
The most decent thing will be to GENERATE AN ePub book RIGHT from you Pages Document.
What are you waiting for?

Answer 1

> In general, your application is the best, ever; it's better even than most desktop giants. I love its simplicity and beauty. I really want to bring my book into it. It's a huge Pages / Word file, that I want to be able to work within your application. Any suggestions?
Wow! Thanks for the compliment. Really glad you like it
As I've mentioned on my website, word support is coming, but for now I think the best way to get your document into UX Write is to export it from Word to HTML. Unfortunately the output Word produces isn't particularly good, so it may need some manual cleaning up.
> 1) Consider direct button for bold and italics
If you're using the on-screen keyboard, you can already do this (hold down the formatting key, and then press bold/italics)
> 2) Consider sub and super script letters
This is on the to do list.
> 3) Consider saving FROM iPad to DropBox (moving, copying, whatever).
Yes, I need to add better file management support (a major deficiency of iOS IMHO). Copying, moving, renaming etc are all planned for a future version, and won't be far off. For now, it's possible to use iTunes file sharing to access the files stored in the "My iPad" section, and you can move them to dropbox on your computer.
> 4) Consider using numbered headings optional, but offer it actively
In the latest update (1.0.1) you can turn numbering on and off individually by tapping twice (or long pressing and releasing) on the heading, and selecting "remove number"/"add number". In the future I'll be making this an option for styles.
> 5) Consider importing documents from Pages and Word and ODT (OpenOffice) and then asking the user how WE want the styles mapped.
What I'm planning here is not an import and export as such (which is a lossy process), but to keep the original structure of the document and just apply the relevant changes to it at save time. Any formatting attributes or document elements that UX Write doens't understand (e.g. embedded spreadsheets) will be left in place, and still be there when you go back to your PC/Mac. I've promised support for Word in my roadmap, and am very strongly considering ODT support as well.
> 6) Consider exporting documents to Pages and Word or OpenOffice (ODT)
As above
> 7) Consider allowing the user to edit CSS and HTML code, directly. I can send the document to Textastic, I can examine it there, maybe edit it, preview it, but I can't bring it back to Ux.
That's an interesting option. I'm tempted to rely on third-party programs for this, because there are already several (like textastic) which do this kind of thing very well, and it's a lot of work to implement. I think the best option would be for me to contact the author of textastic and work on a way to easily get the document back into UX Write so that people can easily use the two apps together.
> 8) Highly important: allow URL for pictures / figures / graphics!
I agree this would be handy. The main challenge is working out how to do this in an intuitive manner that will gracefully handle the case of broken links. I need to give some more thought to this.
> 9) Provide a way to EXPORT, edit, copy, handle, the HTML generated.
I'm not sure what you mean by this - it's already possible to access the HTML files via Dropbox/WebDAV from other apps, and you can also email the HTML file to yourself directly from the app. Is this the kind of thing you're talking about?
> I have a large — 169,000 words — document in Word. It is also in Pages (no styles, only direct formatting). Of course, I would like to IMPORT it into UX. However, the HTML generated by Word turns out to be too dirty and huge. I will experiment to see what it does, but if you have any straightforward suggestions, please, let me know.
169,000 words with direct formatting - ouch! I can see why you want to change The largest document I've tested it with so far is my 116,000 word PhD thesis (which I originally wrote on LyX), and it works ok on that, though I need to improve performance of loading and saving.
Word produces horrible HTML output, and this is a big problem at the moment for bringing content into UX Write. Once I have native word support in, the situation will be much better.
> Again, thanks for such a great applications for writers…
Thanks!
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