Searching pages

[rodney985]

I want to write a recipe book on my iPad and thinking of buying pages to do it. Will I be able to search, then search within that search. Say i search for Italian and get 20 matches, then search chicken and reduce it to 10, then main meal 4?

 

[twerppoet]

Pages is a word processing app, not a database. When you search in it you are looking for words and phrases, not a page that they are on. Like most word processing apps the search feature is primarily for editing; finding and replacing text.

Besides, from what you are saying I think it is the final product, the book, that you want to be able to do the searches in. Pages is for creating. For searching the book you want to look at what format and reader you will export too. It does not matter too much what you use to write the book with, as long as it exports to the format you need; so it's that format you need to pin down before you decide what app to use when writing the book.

That said, I can't think of any ebook reader that does searches the way you want. Again, books are not databases; when you search in them you find words and phrases, not pages or records.

What you need to do what you want is an app, either special made for recipes or a general database.

 

[freebirdforever]

Could always create the book via the new ibook author (if you have a mac that is)

Sent from my DROID2 GLOBAL using Tapatalk

 

[twerppoet]

Except searching in iBooks is just like any other book search. You can find words and phrases. The kind of search the OP asked for does not exist (again, to my knowledge) in any book reading app. It's a database style search.

Other than that, I think iBooks Author would do a good job of making a recipe book. I think Apple even mentions it on their description page, or maybe I'm thinking of some article.

I suppose if you were up to the HTML5 and javascript coding, it might be possible to create some kind of supper search table of contents widget that would do the job. It don't think you could actually search the book, but you should be able to generate a database from the book's text and include it in the contents widget.

 

[rodney985]

Thanks guys. so when i have whole book on pages the search on the iPad would do the search i need, as long as the phrases were the same. So technally could just use the notes part of iPad. Do you guys think pages is the best word processing app for ipad?

 

[twerppoet]

No. The search type you want is not possible in iBooks. If you searched for meat, beef, dinner in iBooks you would only find results if somewhere in the book you had the exact phrase "meat, beef, dinner"; commas and all.

The kind of search you are describing is a database search. Each recipe would be a record with attributes. There is no way to turn your recipe into a record with attributes in iBooks (or any other ebook reader I know of). Recipe books in the App Store that can do this are actually database apps made to look like books. That is why you download them as separate apps, not into a book reader like iBooks.

If you are going to create an ebook recipe book your best bet is a well organized table of contents and glossary; just like a traditional recipe book.

Other than that, I know of at least one forum member that uses Pages to write books; or at least as part of the workflow of writing a book. For something like a recipe book that is going to have a lot of custom layout, I think Pages is an excellent choice. But hold in mind that is from someone who has never written a book, let alone a recipe book.