One of the more irritating things about Mavericks is how some capabilities have been lost in the transition to newness. I do like the new free versions of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. I like them a whole lot more than Office, for sure. But some puzzling things have appeared.

The one which affects me the most is the inability of the new Pages to open RTF files. This doesn’t sound too bad, but many of the word.docs produced by other software are really RTF files with a doc extension. I just exported a PDF into a Word doc, and Pages refused to open it—saying it was an RTF file.

Helping authors who are leaving traditional publishers and vanity presses

I have needed to recover books from PDFs several times. Authors approach me to help them republish their books when all their publisher will give them is a PDF of the published book.

It’s a frustrating process, but necessary. At present I must export the PDFs into Word docs, open the resulting file in Pages for minimal editing, before I can drop the book into InDesign for reformatting. Don’t tell me to buy another copy of Word or Office. My life, in general, is much improved with that monstrosity relegated to the dustbin.