Betalogue

Pages’ text wrapping algorithm appears to be suffering from some kind of flaw. In certain situations, if you use an “s” between parentheses to indicate an optional plural form for a word, as in “the flaw(s)“, Pages will not hesitate to break the line between the word and the “(s)“.

Here’s an example in French (where the same convention is used to indicate an optional plural form):

Before you ask: No, I assure you, there is no space between “enfant” and “(s)“.

Strangely enough, I am not able to reproduce this reliably (hence the example in French).

Even stranger is the fact that, when I export the document as a Word document, and then open it with TextEdit, the same flaw is apparent — even though TextEdit strips the automatic numbering, which it appears to be unable to handle.

If I then open the exported Word document in Word, “enfant” and “(s)” stay together, regardless of what I do.

In other words, there appears to be a flaw in the underlying text wrapping engine that both Pages and TextEdit use. But it’s not an obvious flaw. (In most situations with an option “(s)“, the “(s)” will stay with the word that comes before it.)

Strange.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Thursday, March 3rd, 2005 at 5:38 am and is filed under Mail. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.