This is a problem that tends to happen a bit too often for my taste. Apple chooses a keyboard shortcut for a command, and the shortcut involves a character key that is not as readily accessible on foreign keyboards as it is on the standard US keyboard, or that’s not even readily accessible in the […]
While both Pages and Word use font anti-aliasing (a.k.a. font/text smoothing), I cannot help but notice that the end product is markedly different. Here’s a paragraph in Times New Roman 11 pt at 175% in Word: Here’s the same paragraph in Times New Roman 11 pt at 175% in Pages: Not quite the same, is […]
Pages has a zoom feature for viewing documents, and it has a decent range of options (including some fixed zoom percentages and then adaptable zoom settings that vary depending on the size of the document window). But it has one problematic limitation: it does not let you specify a numeric zooming value other than the […]
Because I work in two different languages (English and French), I am more than aware of issues that arise when switching from one language to another in a software application. For example, Microsoft Word might be a multilingual Word processor, but, in many respects, the multilingual features are just an added layer, and are not […]
For some reason, when I export a Pages document as a Microsoft Word document and then open the exported document in Word, I see all kinds of manual tab stops in the ruler. More specifically, there is one manual tab stop at each centimeter.: My settings in Pages are to have default tab stops every […]
I find it quite astounding that Roxio Toast 6, a very mature product, still gets fundamental UI behaviours completely wrong. For example, if you launch the application, then click on the “Data” tab, then click on the “New Disc” button to create a new disc, Toast creates a new disc called “My Disc“, selects the […]
I am glad that Pages does not include several different view modes, such as Microsoft Word’s “Normal” and “Page Layout” view modes. In spite of Word 2004’s painfully slow performance and response times, I am more than convinced that today’s computers have more than enough power to handle WYSIWYG word processing in real time without […]
There must be something about non-breaking spaces and Type 1 fonts in Mac OS X… First, it was Word 2004 with its bug where a non-breaking space in a Type 1 font causes the word processor to switch to Times New Roman… And now this bug in Pages. Type a paragraph of text in a […]
Yesterday, I wrote an item about options for text selection in Pages. This prompted a reader to write to me about key bindings in Cocoa applications and how they could be used to achieve some of the things that I wanted to achieve. He also provided me with a ready-made file called DefaultKeyBinding.dict that I […]
It’s probably quite revealing that there is no section in the Pages manual on the art of selecting text. It looks as if Apple is assuming that people are already familiar with standard Mac OS X text selection procedures, which are — or at least should be — the same across all text-based applications, including […]
It was, in some respects, normal service resumed for Arsenal, with goals by Ljunberg, Henry, and Cole. Lehmann was back in goal (not really surprising after Almunia’s performance against Manchester United) and didn’t screw up anything. Senderos was quite impressive in defence. In other respects, there were still clear signs that all is not right. […]
Another big positive aspect of Pages as a word processor is the fact that styles are featured so prominently in the user interface. There are still far too many word processor users that never use styles and do all their character and paragraph formatting manually using legacy tools such as the schizophrenic Formatting Palette and […]
I have started using Pages and will be reporting on various issues as I encounter them. The first thing I want to note is how appreciative I am of the fact that the default “Body” style used by Pages as the default style for body text in a document actually includes a default setting of […]
BBC Sport reports on Arsenal chairman Peter Hill-Woods telling Arsène Wenger he has money for new players. Er — didn’t the transfer window just close for another six months? Meanwhile, I am beginning to like Chelsea less and less… Apparently, their manager Mourinho was not happy about the fact that Blackburn played “dirty” last night. […]
As regular Betalogue readers know, due to comment spam issues, I was recently forced to change the default behaviour on my blog for users wanting to post comments on a blog item. Betalogue readers now have to register before they can post a comment. Before that, unregistered users could see a form at the bottom […]