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Word 2004: Dumb ‘smart cut-and-paste’ with line breaks

Wednesday, October 26th, 2005

Cutting a line with a manual line break inserts a superfluous space character.

Word 2004: Dumb ‘smart cut-and-paste’ behaviour when it comes to text formatting

Monday, July 25th, 2005

Description of an annoying side-effect of the “Smart Cut-and-Paste” feature in Word 2004.

Word 2004: Smart cut-and-paste not smart enough with apostrophes in French

Thursday, September 2nd, 2004

I’ve already described the problem with apostrophes in French and Word X’s text drag-and-drop feature. This is just to note, first of all, that the problem is not fixed in Word 2004, and also that it also affects the “Paste” command, because the “Smart cut and paste” option (in “Preferences…“, under “Edit“) actually applies to both […]

OS X Tip: Better than ‘Paste and Match Style’

Saturday, November 15th, 2014

Yesterday, Jason Snell’s Six Colors web site posted a tip about using OS X’s built-in keyboard customization features to create a universal shortcut for a command for pasting as plain text. While the tip is not useless, it neglected to mention the fact that the menu command labelled “Paste and Match Style” is not nearly as […]

Word 2011: Why does word selection still select the trailing space?

Thursday, June 13th, 2013

In Microsoft Word, there is a myriad of inconsistencies, behaviours that don’t make sense and are simply the way they are because they have always been that way and nobody at Microsoft bothers to use his or her brains to think about whether these things still make sense today. Take, for example, what happens when […]

Really Smart Paste: Keyboard Maestro and BBEdit to fix copied text from on-line database and other sources

Wednesday, November 28th, 2012

As a professional translator in Canada, I am constantly referring to the TERMIUM database, which became accessible free-of-charge a couple of years ago as part of the Language Portal of Canada. One thing I do not like when using on-line databases, however, is having to retype things. Whenever I have to look up a term, […]

Word 2011: Interface for adjusting space before and after paragraphs

Monday, November 8th, 2010

If, like me, you are a word processor user who likes to compose “smart” documents and use the proper text formatting options instead of ugly workarounds like double returns and multiple tabs (we are admittedly a small minority, but we do exist), I am sure that you will be delighted to hear that, in the […]

More about Smart Cut/Copy/Paste (after Gruber)

Tuesday, May 9th, 2006

A note about the Smart Cut/Copy/Paste behaviours recently discussed by John Gruber.

French punctuation and text selection: Pages is smarter than Word 2004

Wednesday, March 15th, 2006

At least Pages gets some important details right that Microsoft Word still hasn’t got right after all these years.

Idea for word processors/text editors: Really smart drag-and-drop (for whole words)

Friday, September 23rd, 2005

A small, yet significant improvement that could be implemented in text drag-and-drop.

Word 2004 Tip: Selecting a sentence

Monday, March 21st, 2005

And now for a bit of Microsoft-sponsored fun… For years I have been lamenting the lack of “smart” selection tools that would let the user select actual sentences of text rather than just words, lines or entire paragraphs. Today I decided to take a few minutes and try to find if there wasn’t, by any […]

Word X: Another example of poor French support

Wednesday, June 11th, 2003

In the same vein as the previous item: in French (and Canadian French) typography, the colon punctuation mark (:) always comes with a non-breaking space before. Word “knows” this since it inserts that non-breaking space automatically for you if you have set the language of your document to French (or Canadian French) and are using […]

Word X: Drag-and-drop for the French

Wednesday, June 11th, 2003

It is a well-known fact that most computers and most software titles are designed first and foremost for American users. Often times, their “international support” is added as an afterthought and utterly fails to grasp the subtleties of foreign languages. Microsoft Word X is, of course, a particularly painful example. Take this behaviour when you […]

Pages ’09 Tip: Avoid automatic spacing when pasting text

Friday, July 6th, 2012

One of the long-standing annoyances with computer software in general and Mac OS X software in particular is that, after all these years, there is still a strong American bias in many features. While Mac OS X is of course a multilingual OS and supports a number of “international” features, there are still system-wide or application-specific behaviours […]

From Pages ’09 to the web: An XML-based workflow

Friday, April 22nd, 2011

A couple of weeks ago, I set up a new French-language web site at www.fauxamis.fr on which I discuss various issues relating to what linguists call “false friends” or “deceptive cognates” between English and French. The site is WordPress-based, but is not exactly a blog. It’s more like a repository where I will gradually add […]