A couple of weeks ago, I asked in a blog post why Apple had decided to ditch the “Save As…” command in its Lion-optimized applications, including Pages ’09 and Numbers ’09. Today, I decided that I was not going to wait for an answer (which in all likelihood will never come) and that instead I should design […]
After reading my recent post about using DragThing to further customize my Pages ’09 work environment by adding an application-specific dock that would function as a floating palette and provide buttons to execute run-only versions of the AppleScript scripts that I also use in combination with Keyboard Maestro to have convenient keyboard shortcuts for common actions, […]
After I posted about customizing the Pages ’09 user interface with a DragThing dock that performs AppleScript scripts earlier today, I decided to further investigate the reason why I was unable to directly control the value of the “After Paragraph” text field in the “Text” tab of the Text inspector. I had the following script: tell […]
A while ago, I wrote about my use of Keyboard Maestro and AppleScript to create a keyboard shortcut for formatting options like “Keep with following paragraph” and “Keep lines together.” With the default user interface in Pages ’09, the only way to access these commands is through the “More” tab of the Text inspector: When you […]
In order to complete the picture of the custom-designed workflow that I described in my two previous posts: From Pages ’09 to the Web: An XML-based workflow From Pages ’09 to the Web: An XML-based workflow (continued) I think it would be a good idea to provide a few screen captures that illustrate the process in a […]
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 […]
Here’s a bug in Pages ’09 that has been… bugging me for years and I have finally (I think) figured out exactly how to reproduce it: Open a document in Pages ’09. Hide the Pages ’09 application itself. Bring Pages ’09 back to the foreground. Bring up an inspector window if you haven’t got one open already. Go to the […]
Last year, I wrote a series of articles on customizing Pages ’09 with a combination of AppleScript and Keyboard Maestro. At the time, I noted that AppleScript support in Pages ’09 suffered from a bug causing it to fail to compute the offset of the current selection in a document if that selection comes after a section […]
The default behaviour of the Page Up and Page Down keys in Pages ’09 has one rather irritating aspect. Say you have a multiple-page document open in Pages ’09. You scroll back to the very beginning of the document and then you select the “Fit Page” option in the zoom menu in the bottom-left corner of the […]
If, like me, you regularly use Pages ’09 to edit Word documents and then export your work back in Word format before sharing it with other people, you need to aware of a number of issues, including what happens to automatic tables of contents. Both Word 2011 and Pages ’09 have a feature that inserts an automatic […]
If I had to provide a very visual illustration of the quality of Microsoft Word for Mac OS X, this would be a good example. I am working on a Word document authored by someone else. (I have no idea what version of Word they used. It’s apparently too much to ask that Word include that information […]
Sometimes, when you are composing a document in your word processor, you have a list of items that’s a bit long, and each item is very short: In such a situation, you might want to put the list of items in two or three columns side by side. But you don’t want to have to […]
By default, if you use the blank template in Pages ’09 to create a new document, you get a document in which the default paragraph style has zero space after and zero space before. (That was not the case with the first version of Pages back in 2005. Back then, the default body style has a […]
If, like me, you quite often use Pages ’09 instead of the Holy Crappiness known as Microsoft Word, and just export your Pages documents as Word documents before sharing them with other people, there are a number of problems that you need to be aware of and that require that you edit your exported Word documents […]
I have no idea why, but quite often when I am in the process of creating a table in Pages ’09, the application decides to have its own ideas about what the desirable row height is for each row in the table. For example, I start by creating a table that looks like this: The table […]