I sent the following enhancement request to the Pages team via the Apple website and figured it’d be a good idea to share it here as well. Perhaps you have some suggestions for me, something that could help me in the meantime?

1. Better memory management. My wife and I write graphics-rich books (recipe books, piano methods etc.). Currently, there is no way to layout an entire book in a single Pages document, because after 5-7 pages or so containing digital photographs imported at print-ready resolution, Pages runs into a memory management bottleneck and every keystroke takes 1-2 seconds. We’re forced to either work on individual pages as separate files, which makes pagination and text flow a real hassle, or to divide the book into sections of a few pages each and basically run into the same pagination and text flow issues.
2. Support for offset printing in Pages. It’s great that I can export to digital book formats (ePub, PDF) but what I really need is support for export to offset printing methods. When I export to a PDF from Pages, the text is never 100% black. It’s a mixture of colors, which is a disaster in the making for offset printing and necessitates a lot of work on the resulting files after they’re exported from Pages, just to get them offset-ready. Please include a one-click PDF export for offset; call it what you will, but make it work.