The Pagehand Look and Feel

It’s easier to describe the Pagehand interface in terms of what it doesn’t have: floating palettes, lots of dialog boxes, and icons everywhere.

Pagehand is optimized for people who are thinking about what they are writing. When you write, you engage parts of the brain that process the written word. You can recognize words almost instantaneously. If you have to stop and do a different kind of task—say, figuring out what a particular icon stands for—you use different parts of the brain. It’s a simple idea: when you’re writing, it’s faster and easier to recognize a word than an icon.

There are times when you engage some of those other brain regions, for example when deciding how a paragraph should be aligned. That’s a good time to use a pictorial abstraction like an icon. But when you’re writing and want to insert a table, we’re pretty sure you’d rather see the word “table” than a picture of a table. A toolbar loaded down with dozens of little buttony icons is something you will never see in Pagehand.