Re: I'd pay
"The way Pages handles this much better than say LibreOffice Writer which happily opens a Word file, damages its layout and writes the damaged content back to the original file."
My own casual interactions with Word and and trying to read its profusion of formats in other programs indicate that this is a design feature on Microsoft's part.
Wordperfect did it better, you can open a WP document in pretty much any version you like, and it won't eat your formatting. Its only major wart IMO is embedding printer information in the document.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
