Pages: No easy line/paragraph selection

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Pages
February 5th, 2005 • 8:14 am

It’s probably quite revealing that there is no section in the Pages manual on the art of selecting text. It looks as if Apple is assuming that people are already familiar with standard Mac OS X text selection procedures, which are — or at least should be — the same across all text-based applications, including Apple’s own TextEdit, Mail, etc.

It also means that Apple has not added anything to the standard Mac OS X text selection features in Pages. Which, in turn, means that there is no really easy way to select entire lines or paragraphs.

In Microsoft Word, you can use mouse clicking in the left margin of a document to select lines (with a single click) or paragraphs (with a double click).

In Pages, on the other hand, you have to click three times on a paragraph to select it. And there is no easy way to select a line at all. The only way to select a line is to click-and-drag from the beginning to the end of the line. I am afraid that’s not really very convenient.

Of course, all the usual keyboard shortcuts for text selection are there. But here again, unless I am mistaken, there is no shortcut for selecting a line of text.

I am afraid that the use of the left margin to select text is a habit that is deeply ingrained into many Word users. They are going to miss it in Pages. I know I am. I don’t really like triple-clicking — I find that it requires too much tension in the index finger. And for selecting lines, well, there’s no option.

This is a bit disappointing.


2 Responses to “Pages: No easy line/paragraph selection”

  1. Pierre Igot says:

    Well, that’s what I meant :). Click-and-drag from beginning to end. I didn’t mean to say that you have to drag horizontally across every line :).

    In my opinion, this is not an acceptable substitute. Too finicky for such a common action that needs to be repeated so often. It’s like asking us to click and drag from the beginning to the end of a word in order to select it instead of being able to use the double-click.

  2. Jussi says:

    > The only way to select a line is to click-and-drag from the beginning to the end of the line.

    This is not correct. You can select a line by clicking in beginning of the line and dragging down. This is perhaps not as easy as in Word, but in my opinion quite acceptable.

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