Archive for the 'Pages' Category

Pages ’09: How to centre an inline table

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010 • 11:34 am

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 […]

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Pages ’09: Can’t cancel Word document ‘opening’ process

Friday, March 12th, 2010 • 4:27 pm

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: […]

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Pages ’09: Word-by-word selection with keyboard or mouse

Monday, March 8th, 2010 • 6:33 pm

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 […]

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Pages ’09: Bookmarks affect text selection

Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 • 1:24 pm

In Pages, you can select any text string and turn it into a bookmark using the “Bookmark” tab in the “Link” inspector: This can be handy when you need to add cross-references inside your document. The problem is that, even though the creation of a bookmark is an invisible process (you can view bookmarks but […]

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Desperately seeking smarter word processor

Monday, February 8th, 2010 • 3:39 pm

Take the following excerpt from a simple word processor document: Note where the insertion point is located (at the beginning of the second paragraph). Now what do you think will happen when I start typing from that insertion point? More specifically, do you expect the inserted text to be in bold or not? Well, here […]

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Pages ’09: Smart quotes and Find/Replace features

Monday, November 30th, 2009 • 6:38 pm

A while ago, I ranted about Pages ’09’s on-going apparent inability to do what I ask it to do when it comes to replacing straight apostrophes with curly ones or vice-versa. This week-end, I was able to better pinpoint the exact source of the problem. In a nutshell, the problem is that the “Use smart quotes” […]

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Pages ’09 Tip: Changing the number format of an existing page number

Wednesday, November 25th, 2009 • 12:32 pm

Pages ’09 has two ways to insert a page number in the footer or header of a document. You can open the header or footer, format things the way you want and then just use the “Page Number” command in the “Insert” menu, which inserts a simple text field. Or you can use the weirdly named […]

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Pages ’09: Misinterprets character formatting as paragraph formatting

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 • 6:19 pm

Unlike Microsoft Word, which is still (after all these years) totally confused about the whole thing, Apple’s Pages at least has a user interface that makes clear distinctions between paragraph styles and character styles, both in the styles drawer and in the formatting toolbar: (In Word 2008, there is a single field in the toolbar […]

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Pages ’09 Tip: Double-click on endnote number to return to text

Thursday, October 1st, 2009 • 3:18 pm

Apple’s word processor Pages takes a resolutely WYSIWYG approach. Gone are the multiple view modes afforded by Microsoft Word. On the whole, it is a welcome simplification. After all, the paradox at the heart of the very existence of Microsoft Word’s “Normal” view mode (now called “Draft” in Word 2008) is that it’s supposed to […]

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Pages ’09: Character formatting and numbered lists

Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 • 3:28 pm

I don’t doubt that this will be filed under “Nit-picking” by some people, but to me it is a usability issue and it’s not inconsequential. In a Pages ’09 document, start a new paragraph and select the automatic list numbering feature (either with the toolbar or with the “Numbered List” list style in the styles drawer). […]

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Pages ’09: Forgets formatting change after manual line break

Friday, September 11th, 2009 • 9:59 am

Try the following: Open a new document in Pages ’09. Press command-I to switch to italics. Type a line of text in italics. Press command-I to switch back to roman. Type shift-Enter to insert a manual line break. Type some text. The text should be in roman characters. It’s not. It’s back in italics, even though […]

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Pages ’09: Keep a list of your customized shortcuts handy

Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 • 10:14 am

Apple’s Pages application has very limited keyboard shortcut customization abilities. The only shortcuts that you can assign within the application’s user interface are the F1 to F8 keys, and they can only be used for styles: Fortunately, Pages ’09, like most other well-behaved Mac OS X applications, also supports the system-wide keyboard shortcut customization feature provided […]

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Pages ’09: Wrong focus in Full Keyboard Access

Friday, June 5th, 2009 • 9:47 am

I always have Full Keyboard Access on on my machine, not because I suffer from repetitive stress injuries, but because I don’t like having to switch from the keyboard to the mouse and back all the time. Because of this, I tend to notice problems that might not be apparent to Mac users who do […]

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Pages ’09: Major problems with Find/Replace case-matching

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 • 10:10 am

The case-matching scheme used by Pages ’09’s Find/Replace feature is seriously screwed. When you switch to the “Advanced” tab in the “Find/Replace” dialog box, you have the option to check a box labelled “Match case.” If you check it, then Pages ’09 restricts the search to occurrences that match the exact case of the text string you […]

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Pages ’09: Problem with applying text colour

Monday, June 1st, 2009 • 5:41 pm

Generally speaking, Pages ’09 is pretty good when it comes to handling formatting options for heterogeneous selections. If, for example, you have a paragraph to which you have applied the “Keep with following paragraph” formatting option followed by a paragraph to which you have not applied the option, when you combine both paragraphs into a single, […]

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