Word 2004: Dumb ‘smart cut-and-paste’ with line breaks
Wednesday, October 26th, 2005Cutting a line with a manual line break inserts a superfluous space character.
Cutting a line with a manual line break inserts a superfluous space character.
Description of an annoying side-effect of the “Smart Cut-and-Paste” feature in Word 2004.
I’ve already described the problem with apostrophes in French and Word X’s text drag-and-drop feature. This is just to note, first of all, that the problem is not fixed in Word 2004, and also that it also affects the “Paste” command, because the “Smart cut and paste” option (in “Preferences…“, under “Edit“) actually applies to both […]
Yesterday, Jason Snell’s Six Colors web site posted a tip about using OS X’s built-in keyboard customization features to create a universal shortcut for a command for pasting as plain text. While the tip is not useless, it neglected to mention the fact that the menu command labelled “Paste and Match Style” is not nearly as […]
In Microsoft Word, there is a myriad of inconsistencies, behaviours that don’t make sense and are simply the way they are because they have always been that way and nobody at Microsoft bothers to use his or her brains to think about whether these things still make sense today. Take, for example, what happens when […]
As a professional translator in Canada, I am constantly referring to the TERMIUM database, which became accessible free-of-charge a couple of years ago as part of the Language Portal of Canada. One thing I do not like when using on-line databases, however, is having to retype things. Whenever I have to look up a term, […]
If, like me, you are a word processor user who likes to compose “smart” documents and use the proper text formatting options instead of ugly workarounds like double returns and multiple tabs (we are admittedly a small minority, but we do exist), I am sure that you will be delighted to hear that, in the […]
A note about the Smart Cut/Copy/Paste behaviours recently discussed by John Gruber.
At least Pages gets some important details right that Microsoft Word still hasn’t got right after all these years.
A small, yet significant improvement that could be implemented in text drag-and-drop.
And now for a bit of Microsoft-sponsored fun… For years I have been lamenting the lack of “smart” selection tools that would let the user select actual sentences of text rather than just words, lines or entire paragraphs. Today I decided to take a few minutes and try to find if there wasn’t, by any […]
In the same vein as the previous item: in French (and Canadian French) typography, the colon punctuation mark (:) always comes with a non-breaking space before. Word “knows” this since it inserts that non-breaking space automatically for you if you have set the language of your document to French (or Canadian French) and are using […]
It is a well-known fact that most computers and most software titles are designed first and foremost for American users. Often times, their “international support” is added as an afterthought and utterly fails to grasp the subtleties of foreign languages. Microsoft Word X is, of course, a particularly painful example. Take this behaviour when you […]
One of the long-standing annoyances with computer software in general and Mac OS X software in particular is that, after all these years, there is still a strong American bias in many features. While Mac OS X is of course a multilingual OS and supports a number of “international” features, there are still system-wide or application-specific behaviours […]
A couple of weeks ago, I set up a new French-language web site at www.fauxamis.fr on which I discuss various issues relating to what linguists call “false friends” or “deceptive cognates” between English and French. The site is WordPress-based, but is not exactly a blog. It’s more like a repository where I will gradually add […]