Mac OS X’s user interface comes with a built-in facility for creating Zip archives, in the form of a command called “Compress…” in the Finder’s “File” menu or in the contextual action menu. (I believe the command used to be called “Archive…” in versions of Mac OS X prior to Mac OS X 10.5, also […]
Today, I decided I was tired of waiting for Apple to add to Pages ’09—which is my main word processor these days—the functionality that I need to be really productive with it and which I have been living without for the past few years. One of my main issues with Pages is the lack of customizability […]
This is something that has been bugging me for a long time, and I’ve finally found the answer to my questions. In Pages ’09, you have two kinds of tables: inline tables and floating tables. Floating tables stay in a fixed position on the page and are not tied to the flow of the text. Inline […]
Try the following experiment. Put a sample PDF file (any PDF file) on your desktop. Let’s say it’s called “test.pdf.” Now open the file in Preview. It does not matter how you open it (double-click, “Open” command in “File” menu, etc.). As soon as you’ve opened it, it will be listed at the top of […]
Following yesterday’s post on the other problem I recently encountered in Mac OS X’s Preview, with the Clipboard failing to properly preserve accented characters, I have received a few e-mails which have helped me narrow down the problem. Betalogue reader John M. wonders whether it makes any difference in which application I attempt to paste […]
I am just not having much luck with Mac OS X’s Preview application these days. After the problem with weird blocks of text rendered as black and grey boxes discussed last week, here’s another one I encountered this week-end while working with a French-language PDF document. As with the last problem, I am able to […]
Following my post yesterday about weird seemingly font-related issues in Snow Leopard’s Preview application, a couple of readers have written to provide more information. One of them noted that he was also able to reproduce the same problem with the same sample PDF file in Tiger’s Preview application, i.e. in Mac OS X 10.4.x. So […]
Ever since I upgraded to Snow Leopard on my main workstation, I have been experiencing rather weird issues that all seem to be font-related. The most obvious one was a problem where the Myriad font that I was using in my invoices in Pages seemed to have become completely corrupted. Instead of displaying the text […]
Question: What process in Pages ’09 can take up to several minutes and is impossible to cancel once it has been started? Answer: The process of open a relatively complex Microsoft Word document in the Pages application itself. Here’s the user interface for this: And here’s what you can do while the process is in progress: […]
The other day, a young friend of mine came to be with a three-year-old MacBook in obvious distress. According to him, the symptoms had started on that very morning with a freeze during web browsing. Thinking nothing of it, he had force-quit his browser and then continued working. Then shortly after the first freeze, he […]
Pages ’09: Word-by-word selection with keyboard or mouse Here’s an excerpt from the type of document that I encounter every day in my line of work: As you can see, it’s taken from some kind of form, and includes spaces to fill in, which were created using rows of the underline character (_). It’s not necessarily […]