Articles posted in January, 2009

Pages ’09: Fails to scroll down when extending selection with option-shift-Down

Thursday, January 29th, 2009 • 2:20 pm

Regular Betalogue readers know that I am heavy user of text navigation and text selection keyboard shortcuts when editing text. In particular, I frequently use the option-shift-Down and option-shift-Up keyboard shortcuts to extend the current selection paragraph by paragraph towards the end or the beginning of the document I am currently editing. (Sadly, the otherwise […]

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Pages ’09: Focus bug after hiding application

Wednesday, January 28th, 2009 • 3:20 pm

Like most x.0 versions, Pages ’09 (technically Pages 4.0) suffers from a few unfortunate bugs that obviously weren’t caught or fixed during the beta testing process. Here’s one that may appear minor, but affects users who make heavy use of keyboard shortcuts. Say you have two document windows open in Pages ’09, Window A and […]

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Numbers ’09: Where is the ‘More’ tab in the Text inspector?

Thursday, January 22nd, 2009 • 3:13 pm

Here is what the user guide for Numbers ’09 says on page 185: Each language has a different spelling dictionary. To make sure that the correct language is selected, select the text you want to work with, click Inspector in the toolbar, click the Text button, and then click More. Select a language from the […]

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iWork ’09 (Retail): No longer uses a serial number

Wednesday, January 21st, 2009 • 11:20 am

Macworld (UK) reports on something that I noticed myself when I received my retail copy of iWork ’09 in the mail: it no longer uses a serial number. This was somewhat disconcerting, as I had been using the trial version downloaded from the Apple web site for a few days, and so I thought I […]

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Pages ’09: Still cannot replace straight apostrophes with curly ones

Wednesday, January 21st, 2009 • 10:52 am

A while back, I wrote about the fact that it was impossible, in Pages 3.0 (Pages ’08), to use the application’s find/replace feature to find a text string containing a curly apostrophe: “Pages 3.0: Can’t find text string with curly apostrophe” As per usual, at the same time I wrote the blog post, I also […]

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Word 2008 Tip: Page Up and Page Down without moving cursor

Thursday, January 15th, 2009 • 7:09 pm

For years, Word has had this stupid “feature” where the default behaviour of the Page Up and Page Down keys is not just to go up or down by one “page” (more accurately, by one “screen,” where a screen is defined by the size of the visible portion of the document in the document window), […]

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Pages ’09: Bug with page count

Thursday, January 15th, 2009 • 6:01 pm

I don’t know who’s on the AppleSeed program for iWork, but they are not doing their job properly. Pages ’09 has a new and rather obvious bug affecting the “Page Count” feature (accessible through the “Insert” menu). If you have a Pages document with two sections, and you set the options for the second section […]

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Pages ’09: Bug with hyperlinks

Thursday, January 15th, 2009 • 2:54 pm

The new version of Pages appears to be suffering from a bug in the hyperlink creation process, at least on my machine. When I select a word or phrase and bring up the Link inspector and check the “Enable as a hyperlink” option, Pages turns the selection into a hyperlink whose text label is the […]

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Pages ’09: Still does not convert multi-column Word documents properly

Wednesday, January 14th, 2009 • 5:53 pm

This one is quite puzzling to me. In Microsoft Word, when you want to switch from, say, a 1-column page layout to a 2-column page layout in the same page, you need to use what Microsoft calls a “Continuous Section Break,” i.e. a section break that does not actually cause the document to jump to […]

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Numbers ’09: Subpixel font smoothing, but not in print view

Monday, January 12th, 2009 • 6:49 pm

After noting last week that Apple has finally added support for subpixel font smoothing in Pages ’09, I should note that Apple has also added support for subpixel font smoothing in Numbers ’09. It comes with a twist, however. In Numbers ’09, subpixel font smoothing only works in the regular view mode. In print view, Numbers […]

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Numbers ’09: Now supports header row freezing

Monday, January 12th, 2009 • 6:34 pm

There are good news for Numbers ’09 users who work with large tables. In previous versions of Numbers, the only way to keep a long table’s header row visible at all times was to switch from the regular view mode to the print view mode, where Numbers would divide the tables into pages and show […]

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Pages ’09: Changed shortcuts for adding columns or rows

Friday, January 9th, 2009 • 6:24 pm

In a previous post on this blog, I reported that Apple’s designers made a very unfortunate decision when they chose the keyboard shortcuts for adding columns or rows to tables while editing them. These keyboard shortcuts (option-shift-Up, option-shift-Down, option-shift-Left and option-shift-Right)) happened to be the exact same ones as the ones used for extending a […]

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Pages ’09: Two significant breakthroughs

Wednesday, January 7th, 2009 • 7:59 pm

I am still in the process of exploring the trial version of the new version of Pages in iWork ’09 but I can immediately report on two significant breakthroughs as far as I am concerned. The big one is that Pages now supports subpixel font smoothing. This means that the characters are now rendered in […]

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