Pages 3.0: Colour for invisible markers can now be customized

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Pages
September 19th, 2007 • 2:01 pm

I spend a lot of time complaining about what’s wrong in Pages and other Apple software, so I figure I should also spend a little bit of time reviewing what is right—especially when it is an improvement that solves a problem that I had been complaining about earlier on.

Pages has always had the standard “Show Invisibles” command that reveals the invisible characters in your document, using various symbols (a dot for the regular space, a paragraph symbol for the paragraph mark, etc.).

But in previous versions of Pages, the colour used for all these symbols for invisibles was a very strong sky blue, which could make regular text pretty hard to read—which is why, last year, I posted an article suggesting that Pages should have an option to show all invisibles except for the regular space. (BBEdit has such an option.)

Well, I am pleased to report that, in Pages 3.0, while there is still no option to show all invisibles except for the regular space, the colour used for all the symbols for invisible characters can now be customized, via the application’s preferences, with a standard Mac OS X colour picker.

This means that you can choose a much lighter blue colour (or another colour altogether), and all the invisibles, while still visible, will become much less distracting. Kudos to Apple for noticing that this was a problem and doing something about it.

UPDATE: This new option was actually introduced in Pages 2.0. I just never noticed it until I installed Pages 3.0.


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