Pages ’09: Disappearing cursor when using line break

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Pages
April 1st, 2009 • 9:40 am

Pages ’09 introduces a new bug that did not exist in previous versions of the application.

If you are at the very end of a document in Pages ’09 and you try to insert a line break with shift-Return, more often than not, the blinking cursor will simply disappear altogether.

The line break is inserted properly and the cursor is moved to the beginning of the next line, as expected, but for some reason it stops blinking and therefore becomes invisible.

The cursor only reappears when you start typing again.

Pages ’09 also suffers from another, possibly related new bug. Take a multiple-page Pages document and move the cursor to the very end of it by pressing command-Down. Then insert a line break with shift-Return. The line break is now the final character in the document.

Now press command-Up to move the cursor back to the very beginning of the document. As expected, Pages moves the cursor to the very beginning of the document, and also scrolls up to the top so that the document window’s focus is on the beginning of the document, where the insertion point now is.

Now press command-Down again to move the cursor back to the very end of the document, where the line break is.

If your system behaves like mine, then Pages ’09 will indeed move the cursor back to the very end of the document, but for some reason it will fail to also scroll down to the bottom of the document so that the document window’s focus is on the end of the document, where the insertion point now is.

I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that this is related to the fact that the cursor is invisible, because of the other bug mentioned above.

And I also wouldn’t be surprised to hear that these bugs are related with the other new bug in Pages ’09 that causes it to fail to scroll down when extending the current selection with option-shift-Down beyond the visible section of the document.

All these bugs were introduced in Pages ’09 version 4.0, and are still there in version 4.0.1. Needless to say, as usual, I strongly encourage Betalogue readers to submit these bugs via Apple’s Bug Reporter facility.

If you think that I am mistaken in any way or missing a crucial piece of information, don’t hesitate to let me know by contacting me via the side bar.


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