Articles posted in May, 2010

InDesign CS5: Workaround for missing footnotes bug

Monday, May 31st, 2010 • 2:49 pm

Last year, I wrote about various bugs in InDesign CS4, including one where placing Word documents containing footnotes would sometimes, for no apparent reason, fail to import some of the footnotes and renumber the remaining ones. Needless to say, it was a pretty destructive bug, and one that I hoped Adobe would at least fix […]

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Inside Rick Schaut’s mind

Sunday, May 30th, 2010 • 3:54 pm

John Gruber has just posted a link to my recent post about styles in Pages ’09 and in Word 2008. This has inevitably caused a spike in traffic and linkage activity, for which I am grateful. (I should note that I am using WordPress for this site, and so far I have been fortunate enough not […]

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A bit of sleuthing: Spell Catcher X and Epson driver installers

Thursday, May 27th, 2010 • 11:30 am

Yesterday, I got a call from a friend and fellow Mac user who was experiencing difficulties printing on her Epson Stylus Photo R2400 from her Mac running Mac OS X 10.6. She had had the Epson printer for several years, but only recently had purchased a new iMac running Snow Leopard. During our conversation on […]

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Adobe, Google: Go back to the drawing board

Thursday, May 27th, 2010 • 10:35 am

As a long-time Mac user, there is little that I find more infuriating than software applications made by major developers that are not even able to get the most basic Mac behaviours or UI conventions right. Yesterday, I wrote about Google Chrome’s failure to support Mac OS X’s “smooth scrolling” feature. Today, I wanted to […]

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Google Chrome and smooth scrolling

Wednesday, May 26th, 2010 • 10:13 am

I am glad that Apple has some competition in the web browser department and that Google has finally released the first non-beta version of its Google Chrome browser for Mac OS X. I will definitely give it a try. But I must say that one of the first thing I noticed as soon as I […]

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Adobe CS5: Non-standard cursor to mask unresponsiveness

Tuesday, May 18th, 2010 • 11:05 am

A quick test. What does the following image show? Answer: It’s a snapshot of the “new and improved” cursor animation you get while Photoshop CS5 is busy opening a large file. We are all familiar with this wheel-like animation, of course. It’s the very first thing we see on our screen underneath the grey Apple […]

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Spotlight and exact phrase searches: AppleScript application to include plural forms

Friday, May 14th, 2010 • 4:27 pm

After I wrote about the fact that an exact phrase search (with quotation marks) in Spotlight fails to include plural forms in the search results, I discovered that it was possible to include simple plural forms (i.e. plurals with a simple final “s” appended to the singular) in exact phrase search results by using a […]

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Customizing Word 2008: Fix Page Up and Page Down with AppleScript and Keyboard Maestro

Wednesday, May 12th, 2010 • 4:53 pm

Early in 2009, I wrote a post about my attempts to fix the stupid default behaviour of the Page Up and Page Down keys in Microsoft Word 2008, which don’t just scroll the document up or down, but also move the cursor (insertion point) at the same time. At the time, I wrote that, since […]

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More on Spotlight and exact phrase searches

Tuesday, May 11th, 2010 • 4:37 pm

Last week, I wrote about the fact that an exact phrase search in Spotlight fails to find plural forms when the searched string is a singular phrase. Since then, Betalogue reader Brad L. has written to share a couple of additional bits of information. The main one is that, as Brad has somewhat accidentally discovered […]

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Adobe Creative Suite 5 installation process

Monday, May 10th, 2010 • 4:10 pm

Late in 2008, I devoted an entire post to the ridiculous installation process for Adobe Creative Suite 4 for Mac OS X. The post was widely read and linked to, and I ended up being contacted by an Adobe representative to discuss its contents. (At time, I posted two follow-ups, here and here.) I was invited […]

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Spotlight: Exact phrase search fails to find plural forms

Friday, May 7th, 2010 • 4:44 pm

Although the first version of Spotlight in Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) didn’t include an option for searching for exact phrases of more than one word, thankfully Apple added that option in Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), using the standard notation with quotation marks that is supported by Google and many other search engines. (In […]

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Using styles in word processing: Apple’s Pages vs. Microsoft Word

Thursday, May 6th, 2010 • 1:03 pm

When you have a fairly long document in Pages in which the text formatting is done using a variety of paragraph and character styles, and you do “Select All” to select the entire contents of the document, here’s what the styles drawer looks like: When you open the exact same document in Word 2008, with […]

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Customizing Pages ’09: Updated scripts for toggling All Caps and Small Caps

Wednesday, May 5th, 2010 • 9:36 am

Last month I wrote a post about creating shortcuts for toggling the “All Caps” and “Small Caps” character formatting options in Pages ’09. If you just assign a keyboard shortcut to either command using Mac OS X’s built-in “Keyboard Shortcuts” feature in System Preferences, it will be a shortcut that only works one way, to apply […]

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Apple Discussions forums user interface

Tuesday, May 4th, 2010 • 10:41 am

Is it just me, or is the user interface for the Apple Discussions forums on the web pretty lousy? I typically keep the threads I am currently reading or involved in open in Safari. I am also automatically subscribed to the threads that I start, so that I get e-mail notifications whenever someone posts a […]

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Customizing Pages ’09: Scripts for text inside table cells

Monday, May 3rd, 2010 • 6:21 pm

Over the past few weeks, I have been working on customizing my work environment in Pages ’09 using a combination of AppleScript scripts and Keyboard Maestro. In particular, I have been using this approach to define custom keyboard shortcuts for applying specific character styles and paragraph styles. But in the process of customizing Pages ’09, I also […]

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