Well I just typed my first significant document in Pages, the Apple word processor, on the iPad. It worked surprisingly well! The formatting options were intuitive. Once I turned the device to landscape, I found I could type at full speed as long as I looked at the keyboard. The excellent auto-correction made up for any inaccuracies resulting from the lack of actual keyboard buttons. Amazing! I wouldn't want to do any copying (where having to look at the original document would make it hard to watch the virtual keyboard). I imagine positioning the iPad is important to ergonomics. I am using a music stand, which provides a lot of support and flexibility.
Things got ugly when I went to transfer the device to my Windows laptop via iTunes however. I went ahead and performed a wired sync. I could not find the document. So I looked in iTunes, and saw that under the Apps tab there is a File Sharing section, with a list of Apps and Documents. Clicking on the Pages app did not bring up any related documents. I went back to the iPad, and found an Export option, and chose to export to PDF. Going back to iTunes, I then saw my document in the list. So I clicked the Save To button, and saved the PDF to the desktop. However when I went to view the document in Adobe Reader, I got a message that the embedded font could not be expanded, and the document looked very similar to Braille when viewed. A bunch of dots in a rows where the words should be. In short a lot of work with a poor result.
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