There is a pretty significant bug with the Find/Replace feature in Pages ’09, which makes it rather difficult to trust the application to do the right thing when editing documents with styled text. Here is the scenario. Say you have a Pages document containing a paragraph of text in body style, followed by a paragraph of […]
Even though it is now a fairly mature application (version 4.0.1), Apple’s Pages still suffers from a sometimes rather shocking lack of polish. One of the main culprits in that department is the application’s Find/Replace feature. I have had the opportunity to discuss various shortcomings of that feature over the years: “Pages 1.0.x: ‘Replace All’ ignores […]
Here is a bug that I wouldn’t have discovered by myself, because I only use one printer, but a reader pointed it out to me and I was able to reproduce it on my machine by simply adding a second printer in System Preferences, under “Print & Fax,” for testing purposes. Make sure you have […]
Pages ’09 introduces a new bug that did not exist in previous versions of the application. If you are at the very end of a document in Pages ’09 and you try to insert a line break with shift-Return, more often than not, the blinking cursor will simply disappear altogether. The line break is inserted properly and […]
Some day, developers at Apple and Microsoft (and probably in a few other places) are going to have to wake up to the fact that, in the real world, table cells are not used just for numbers or other types of numerical data, but also as containers for blocks of text of varying length. And […]
Apple has adopted a strange new approach for iWork ’09 updates. It is distributing a package called iWork ’09 Update 1, which updates Pages ’09 from 4.0 to 4.0.1, Numbers ’09 from 2.0 to 2.0.1 and Keynote ’09 from 5.0 to 5.0.1. I guess users who only need Pages and Numbers and don’t care about Keynote have no choice but […]
Microsoft Word for Mac OS X (especially Word 2008) is such an atrocious pile of crap that using it for professional work on large documents requires a leap of faith that I am simply no longer willing to take. One can only endure so many application crashes and corrupted documents (with the associated data loss […]
In Apple’s Pages ’09 application, there are page elements that are simply too easy to click on and select accidentally when you actually mean to do something else entirely. The two most obvious targets here are page headers/footers and table cell borders. Let’s take a typical table in a Pages document: Right now the entire […]
Regular Betalogue readers know that I am heavy user of text navigation and text selection keyboard shortcuts when editing text. In particular, I frequently use the option-shift-Down and option-shift-Up keyboard shortcuts to extend the current selection paragraph by paragraph towards the end or the beginning of the document I am currently editing. (Sadly, the otherwise […]
Like most x.0 versions, Pages ’09 (technically Pages 4.0) suffers from a few unfortunate bugs that obviously weren’t caught or fixed during the beta testing process. Here’s one that may appear minor, but affects users who make heavy use of keyboard shortcuts. Say you have two document windows open in Pages ’09, Window A and […]
A while back, I wrote about the fact that it was impossible, in Pages 3.0 (Pages ’08), to use the application’s find/replace feature to find a text string containing a curly apostrophe: “Pages 3.0: Can’t find text string with curly apostrophe” As per usual, at the same time I wrote the blog post, I also […]
I don’t know who’s on the AppleSeed program for iWork, but they are not doing their job properly. Pages ’09 has a new and rather obvious bug affecting the “Page Count” feature (accessible through the “Insert” menu). If you have a Pages document with two sections, and you set the options for the second section […]
The new version of Pages appears to be suffering from a bug in the hyperlink creation process, at least on my machine. When I select a word or phrase and bring up the Link inspector and check the “Enable as a hyperlink” option, Pages turns the selection into a hyperlink whose text label is the […]
This one is quite puzzling to me. In Microsoft Word, when you want to switch from, say, a 1-column page layout to a 2-column page layout in the same page, you need to use what Microsoft calls a “Continuous Section Break,” i.e. a section break that does not actually cause the document to jump to […]
In a previous post on this blog, I reported that Apple’s designers made a very unfortunate decision when they chose the keyboard shortcuts for adding columns or rows to tables while editing them. These keyboard shortcuts (option-shift-Up, option-shift-Down, option-shift-Left and option-shift-Right)) happened to be the exact same ones as the ones used for extending a […]