I always have Full Keyboard Access on on my machine, not because I suffer from repetitive stress injuries, but because I don’t like having to switch from the keyboard to the mouse and back all the time.
Because of this, I tend to notice problems that might not be apparent to Mac users who do not [...]
The case-matching scheme used by Pages ’09’s Find/Replace feature is seriously screwed.
When you switch to the “Advanced” tab in the “Find/Replace” dialog box, you have the option to check a box labelled “Match case.” If you check it, then Pages ’09 restricts the search to occurrences that match the exact case of the text string you are [...]
Generally speaking, Pages ’09 is pretty good when it comes to handling formatting options for heterogeneous selections. If, for example, you have a paragraph to which you have applied the “Keep with following paragraph” formatting option followed by a paragraph to which you have not applied the option, when you combine both paragraphs into a single, [...]
There is a pretty significant bug with the Find/Replace feature in Pages ’09, which makes it rather difficult to trust the application to do the right thing when editing documents with styled text.
Here is the scenario.
Say you have a Pages document containing a paragraph of text in body style, followed by a paragraph of text in [...]
Even though it is now a fairly mature application (version 4.0.1), Apple’s Pages still suffers from a sometimes rather shocking lack of polish.
One of the main culprits in that department is the application’s Find/Replace feature. I have had the opportunity to discuss various shortcomings of that feature over the years:
“Pages 1.0.x: ‘Replace All’ ignores selection”
“Pages [...]
Here is a bug that I wouldn’t have discovered by myself, because I only use one printer, but a reader pointed it out to me and I was able to reproduce it on my machine by simply adding a second printer in System Preferences, under “Print & Fax,” for testing purposes.
Make sure you have 2 [...]
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 [...]
Some day, developers at Apple and Microsoft (and probably in a few other places) are going to have to wake up to the fact that, in the real world, table cells are not used just for numbers or other types of numerical data, but also as containers for blocks of text of varying length.
And because [...]
Apple has adopted a strange new approach for iWork ’09 updates. It is distributing a package called iWork ’09 Update 1, which updates Pages ’09 from 4.0 to 4.0.1, Numbers ’09 from 2.0 to 2.0.1 and Keynote ’09 from 5.0 to 5.0.1.
I guess users who only need Pages and Numbers and don’t care about Keynote have no choice but to [...]
Microsoft Word for Mac OS X (especially Word 2008) is such an atrocious pile of crap that using it for professional work on large documents requires a leap of faith that I am simply no longer willing to take. One can only endure so many application crashes and corrupted documents (with the associated data loss [...]
In Apple’s Pages ’09 application, there are page elements that are simply too easy to click on and select accidentally when you actually mean to do something else entirely.
The two most obvious targets here are page headers/footers and table cell borders.
Let’s take a typical table in a Pages document:
Right now the entire table is selected. [...]
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 excellent [...]
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 Window [...]
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 submitted a [...]
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 so [...]