Last week, for once, I wrote something positive about Microsoft and about Word 2011, regarding the addition of the long overdue “Paste and Match Formatting” command to the “Edit” menu. Unfortunately, I have to report that, while the command works well overall, it fails in at least one major area. If you copy some formatted […]
A few months ago, I wrote about a bug in Pages ’09’s AppleScript functionality that causes all kinds of problems when working on documents that contain an automatic table of contents. In essence, the presence of the table of contents renders many scripts unusable, because, when a table of contents is present, AppleScript fails to compute […]
When you have a fairly long document in Pages in which the text formatting is done using a variety of paragraph and character styles, and you do “Select All” to select the entire contents of the document, here’s what the styles drawer looks like: When you open the exact same document in Word 2008, with […]
Last month I wrote a post about creating shortcuts for toggling the “All Caps” and “Small Caps” character formatting options in Pages ’09. If you just assign a keyboard shortcut to either command using Mac OS X’s built-in “Keyboard Shortcuts” feature in System Preferences, it will be a shortcut that only works one way, to apply […]
Over the past few weeks, I have been working on customizing my work environment in Pages ’09 using a combination of AppleScript scripts and Keyboard Maestro. In particular, I have been using this approach to define custom keyboard shortcuts for applying specific character styles and paragraph styles. But in the process of customizing Pages ’09, I also […]
Long-time Betalogue readers know that I am an enthusiastic user of Spell Catcher X. Its multilingual spell checking and automatic text entry features are invaluable in my daily work and I totally depend on them for sustaining my high level of productivity. However, while it already does a lot, and does more with each new […]
My recent surge of enthusiasm for Pages ’09 customizations using a combination of the application’s AppleScript support and Keyboard Maestro has, unfortunately, also led me to discover the limitations of said AppleScript support. I already noted that the “Title Case” capitalization option in Pages ’09’s “Format” menu does not seem to have an AppleScript equivalent, which is […]
This is a bug that looks very weird… until you figure out what appears to be causing it. Readers of my recent Betalogue posts know that I am in the process of using a combination of AppleScript and Keyboard Maestro to customize my work environment in Pages ’09, which is my main word processor. In particular, I […]
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote my first post about using a combination of AppleScript and a third-party utility such as Keyboard Maestro or FastScript to customize Pages ’09 and more specifically to assign shortcuts other than F1–F8 to paragraph and character styles. In that post, I indicated that my script for applying the paragraph […]
There is one particular pair of keyboard shortcuts that has a special meaning in Apple’s applications that I simply cannot get used to, and that is the pair command-Up / command-Down. In Apple’s applications, including not just Pages ’09, but also TextEdit, Mail, and Safari, command-Up moves the insertion point all the way back to the […]
One of the few things that truly drive me insane in Apple’s iWork applications is the keyboard shortcuts that they have chosen for the commands to insert additional rows or columns in a table. When you are in a table in Pages ’09, for example, you can use option-Right to insert insert a new column after […]
The proper way to write something like “20th Century” in French is the following: xxe siècle where “xx” is the number in roman numerals in small caps and “e” is a small superscript “e.” As you can imagine, if you have write this type of thing repeatedly in a text, it can quickly become pretty […]
Like Microsoft Word, Pages ’09 comes with a built-in character formatting option called “All Caps” (in the “Format” menu, under “Font › Capitalization”). The main benefit of having a formatting option for this as opposed to a command that just changes the case (as if you’d typed with CapsLock on) is that it is easily reversible (and […]
After my post last week on using scripts and keyboard shortcuts to customize Pages ’09, I was in a “customizing” mood and decided to revisit an old issue for which I used to have a scripted solution back in the days when Microsoft Word was my main word processing tool. The issue has to do with […]
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 […]