Introducing myself and a question about advanced text editing on the Iphone

By Francesco Tissera, 13 February, 2024

Forum
iOS and iPadOS

Hello everyone,

I am Francesco Tissera, a student who is graduating this year, yay!
Anyway, here's the question: I am currently on Android but I plan on switching back to IOS, because I find it way faster, for me efficiency is everything since I work with sighted people every single day.
A month or so ago I bought a Logitech keyboard for my android phone and I have been happily turning in all the assignments I could with the help of the phone and Google Docs.
I was wondering if Pages on the Iphone would allow me to easily format text, navigate through headings, links and such and if multy lingual support would work inside Pages. I'd also like to ask if math content of any kind can be read, navigated and written.
Thanks for any help, Glad to be here at last!

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Comments

By Maldalain on Thursday, February 15, 2024 - 20:40

It is much less keys to press on the iOS to control and navigate the system. On Android it is just the weird key presses that you need to press all the time. For the text formatting, it is intuitive but not that robust, I mean for some pages it is fine, but the longer your document gets the slower VO will be.

By Francesco Tissera on Thursday, February 15, 2024 - 20:40

Thanks for the answer about the keyboard , really appreciate it! Is quicknav supported on IOS?
When it comes to text formatting, it's understandable that VO gets progressively slower. Understandable but not likable right?
What about GDocs? do GDocs and VO get along nicely enough?

By Maldalain on Thursday, February 15, 2024 - 20:40

While Google Docs seemms to be a solid option in this area, I do not believe it is going to work perfectly for you. There are some issues like reporting formating, moving in the text, the layout of the document etc. Scrivener is great, Pages works odd but it is fine, MS Word has potential to be the besst in this area but it is also problematic with VO. A summary is that if you ar looking for experience as far as text processing is concerned that is equivalent to Windows or MacOS then I suggest that you reconsider iOS as an altenrative, it is fine fo for note taking and basic text processing, but not for big writing projects.

By Holger Fiallo on Thursday, February 15, 2024 - 20:40

What about Ulysses? I heard is a good program for that. I might be wrong.

By Maldalain on Thursday, February 15, 2024 - 20:40

Well, Scrivener does me a fantastic job, it is also system-wide platform with Dropbox synchronisation. Scrivener is a paid once app, Ulysses, which is something I do hate about apps, is subscription based and it is not cheap.

By Elena Brescacin on Thursday, February 15, 2024 - 20:40

I use Ulysses but my needs are different - I am a blogger so Ulysses helps with MarkDown formatting. It's quite expensive, yes, and so is the other option I use - Drafts Pro.
A pity for Microsoft Word which has quite a few bugs.

By Khomus on Thursday, February 15, 2024 - 20:40

I mean, I haven't done one yet, but the guy who wrote Personal Power iOS Edition apparently did it all in Ulysses, although he mentioned Scrivener too, which I think came out later. I'm not saying because he did it everybody should do it. I just think it can be easy to say oh X isn't good for Y without really looking at why you're saying that.

I'm not trying to come at anybody, as an example, my main use is Windows, so right away the Mac way of editing, the way the cursor works, drives me nuts and I still haven't figured it out. So for me, if I tried a larger project, I'd really have to be patient in learning how to move around the document and edit it, even with a Bluetooth keyboard. So I can absolutely see reasons why somebody might not want to do a large writing project on iOS, even if it's technically possible.

I just think we owe it to people coming to writing on iOS a well-considered argument, as opposed to a blanket statement like iOS isn't good for large writing projects. At least one person we can verify has done it, and I've heard of people doing most of their college work, including papers and reading textbooks and such, on a phone. The other day, I don't remember if it was here or somewhere else, I saw somebody say they haven't used a desktop in years, because they use their phone for everything. That's strange to me, but apparently it's working for some people.