Saturday, September 30, 2006


yoga & more on pages 2

hooray! my namarupa finally came yesterday!

all yoga students should subscribe to namarupa, eddie stern's fantastic magazine that takes yoga practice seriously. that doesn't mean it's without a sense of humor, however.

but unlike other yoga magazines, there aren't any puffy bits on yoga for cats or ads for high-fashion pants. this is all good.

and the pictures are fantastic; once eddie gets himself some more money, he'll be able to print these as beautifully as they deserve -- many of them are beyond mere national geographic quality, and are firmly artistic, beautiful, historical, ethnographic.

for example, there's a "simple" picture of a schoolgirl wrapped in a shawl with blue ribbons in her hair. this is an amazing piece of portraiture, which could be in the moma.

naturally being myself, i am really enjoying the eccentric r. svoboda's drily entertaining piece on fate vs. free will in yoga. i mean, my name's fortune, after all.

eddie himself also has an interesting article on krishnamacharya, who is basically the root teacher for the most popular types of yoga taught in the west today. this should get a lot of people talking, i think.

one of the core questions that eddie asks -- i wish he had spent the rest of the article addressing this single point alone even -- "what happens when yoga does not come to us, but when we go to yoga?"

let me also continue a bit ot with a further review of iwork's pages 2. to test this application's compatibility with pc word, i imported my corporate letterhead, edited it, added footnotes, comments, fancy formatted tables, and bar charts.

then i sent it back to open in it word, where it looked and worked great. so i made some more edits to the .doc, to simulate collaborating on a text just like you would do on a real work project, and sent it back to pages.

still worked great. the only thing pages lost was the little line above the footnotes. not bad.

so then i took a serious, heavy-hitting word file from a major research firm, a professionally made word .doc with an automatic table of contents, bookmarks, field codes, comments, everything.

the table of contents came in fine in pages, altho' some of the styles didn't quite translate. that could use some improvement, since it's a drag to have to recreate those 3 or 4 styles that didn't come in right and re-apply them.

also, the word feature that allows you to click on a table of contents page number and hop to the page seems broken in pages 2.0.1 now. the workaround for this is to export your file to .pdf using the page converter feature.

of course, i could automagically update the existing table of contents with pages. when i clicked on the imported table of contents, pages knew it was one piece of special text: it correctly highlighted it with a blue box, but the update now button on the floating options palette stayed grayed out.

however, if i used the right-click context menu, that showed the update option, which worked perfectly. so this is a little quirk.

the biggest problem i'm experiencing in pages is that there doesn't seem to be a way to make an index! bookmarks, references, all that exists, but no indices.

of course, word indices don't work so great, so maybe i place too much emphasis on this feature. . .i dunno. i hope apple adds this feature in a release soon.

i'm still very happy with pages 2.0.1 so far. the update to 2.0.2 was just released last week, and while the fixes in this update seem quite minor, i personally like to keep all my software up-to-date.

so i'm downloading that now. . .

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posted by fortune | 9:41 AM | top | link to this | email this: | | | 0 comments