Betalogue

On several occasions, I’ve written about desperately English-centric behaviours in Microsoft Word when it comes to text selection and punctuation.

Punctuation in another language, such as French, usually follows somewhat different rules, and a truly smart word processor would try its best to use behaviours that respect these rules.

I am pleased to report that, in one particular area at least, Apple’s Pages 2 is significantly smarter than Word 2004 when it comes to handling text with French punctuation.

In French, the colon character (:) is always preceded by a non-breaking space. This means that, when you have some text that includes a colon, you usually have a situation like this:

Now imagine that, for some reason, you want to switch the order of the last two words before the colon, and you want to do this using keyboard shortcuts. With the insertion point in the location illustrated above, you would first press option-shift-Right to select the first word:

Then you would press command-X to cut the first word:

Then you would press option-Right to place the cursor after the second word:

And finally you would press command-V to paste the first word after the second word:

The above was done in Word 2004. See what the problem is? Now the punctuation is all screwed up. The non-breaking space is no longer before the colon, where it should be, but it has travelled with the second word and is now between the formerly second (now first) word and the formerly first (now second) word, where you are not supposed to have a non-breaking space. And the colon comes immediately after the (formerly first, now) second word, without the required non-breaking space in between.

Now compare this to what happens in the exact same situation in Pages:

Again, here you want to switch the order of the last two words before the colon. With the insertion point in the location illustrated above, you would first press option-shift-Right to select the first word:

Then you would press command-X to cut the first word:

Then you would press option-Right to place the cursor after the second word:

And finally you would press command-V to paste the first word after the second word:

Much better, isn’t it? Pages is smart enough not to select the trailing space when you select the first word, and consequently it keeps the non-breaking space in the right place, i.e. right before the colon.

Now, I am not sure that Apple implemented this particular behaviour with French punctuation in mind. But whatever the reasons for the choices were, they were the right choices. The Apple approach is the least destructive approach. And presumably it works well with the punctuation rules of other languages as well.

It’s admittedly a small thing, but it’s still an example that illustrates that progress can still be made in the area of word processing. Don’t get me wrong: Pages is far from perfect. It has numerous flaws, many of which I have been documenting on this blog and submitting to Apple as bug reports.

But at least it gets some things right that Microsoft, even after having been working on their word processor for more than 20 years, have still not been able to get right.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Wednesday, March 15th, 2006 at 3:48 pm and is filed under Microsoft, Pages. 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.