Pages: Can’t choose on which side the Styles drawer pops out

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Pages
February 15th, 2005 • 8:13 am

This is a problem that is not unique to Pages, but has been there in various Apple-made Mac OS X applications since the very beginning.

In a nutshell, the question is: How does the user control on which side of the main document window the Styles drawer will pop out?

The answer is: Not easily. As far as I can tell, the only way to control this is to close the Styles drawer, then move the document window close to the right edge of the screen if you want the drawer to pop out on the left-hand side, or to the left edge of the screen if you want the drawer to pop out on the right-hand side. Then open the Styles drawer again.

What happens is that, if there is not enough room available to display the drawer on one side because the document window is too close to the screen’s edge, then Pages will open it on the other side.

There is the exact same problem in Mac OS X’s Preview application, with the Pages/Table of Contents drawer.

It is rather ridiculous. Surely someone at Apple realizes that the user needs to have better control over where the drawer pops out.

(In case you are wondering, if the document window is so big that there is not enough room for the drawer on either side of it, then Mac OS X will open it on the right-hand side regardless of how much room is available to display it.)


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