Re: Pages document
Re: Pages document
- Subject: Re: Pages document
- From: John Stiles <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2007 08:57:52 -0700
On Sep 14, 2007, at 5:23 AM, Scott Thompson wrote:
On Sep 13, 2007, at 7:21 PM, John Stiles wrote:
*cue laugh track*
No, in all seriousness, I think he has a good point. We can load
up RTF files into our NSTextViews with only a few lines of code. I
don't think it's too much to ask that Pages documents be supported
with a similar API. (To the best of my knowledge, the answer is
"no, there is no API for this in Tiger.")
There's a question here. Do you want to render the entire Pages
document, or just some preview of it?
There's no API to render an ENTIRE pages document in Tiger, and I
don't know that it would be a good idea to have a dedicated API to
do it in any future version.
The issue, in my opinion, is that PDF, RTF, HTML, (DOC being an
exception, but also enjoying only limited support) are all
standards based document formats. Pages, in contrast, is a
"proprietary" document format. Pages has a complex layout process
and that entire layout process would have to be incorporated into
the renderer (you'd probably end up with something roughly on the
size of Pages itself). Moreover, it would be harder for Apple to
change the format of pages documents and still maintain backward
compatibility in the renderer. To put it another way, standards
based formats are easier to support because their specifications
are slow and lumbering.
You could say the same thing about HTML documents, but that doesn't
stop NSTextViews from being able to display a mostly-usable version
of the content.
I think this argument doesn't hold much water. Sure, it's possible to
create a Pages document that goes above and beyond what an NSTextView
can do, but I think the same is true of all the formats that you
listed above (of course excepting RTF). 99% of users will be making
normal text documents that could easily be converted into RTF/
NSTextView without any perceived loss of information. There's lots of
justifiable reasons for adding support here.
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