When I installed Lion and started using it, one of the first things I noticed is that command-D no longer worked as a shortcut for the “Don’t Save” button in the dialog box you get when you attempt to close an unsaved document. At first, I thought it was a bug. But I soon realized […]
The more experienced I become, the less inclined I am to rush and install major software upgrades as soon as they are released. I used to be an early adopter, but things have changed. I have been bitten by a few nasty bugs, I have gradually lost some of my patience with software issues and […]
I’ve been very busy with work lately, hence the relative lack of new posts on this blog. Among the extra work that I have taken on, there is a series of jobs involving both English-to-French translation and page layout work with InDesign. I don’t mind doing page layout work myself, because I am fairly comfortable […]
A while ago, I wrote about my use of Keyboard Maestro and AppleScript to create a keyboard shortcut for formatting options like “Keep with following paragraph” and “Keep lines together.” With the default user interface in Pages ’09, the only way to access these commands is through the “More” tab of the Text inspector: When you […]
It’s the frustrated developer in me. Once I start fiddling with code, I cannot stop. (When I was a teenager, I spent hours and hours writing programs, first in Basic, then in compiled Basic, then in assembly code, first on a Sharp MZ80K and then on a Commodore 64. I could have become a software […]
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 […]
Last year, I wrote a series of articles on customizing Pages ’09 with a combination of AppleScript and Keyboard Maestro. At the time, I noted that AppleScript support in Pages ’09 suffered from a bug causing it to fail to compute the offset of the current selection in a document if that selection comes after a section […]
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 […]
I keep writing all kinds of nasty things about Microsoft’s products for Mac OS X, so I guess it is only fair that I should write something (a little something) when Microsoft does finally do something right and includes something that is actually a significant improvement over previous versions. For years, I have been complaining […]
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 […]
Yesterday, I wrote a post about using Keyboard Maestro to assign command-F as a shortcut for selecting iTunes’s search field in the toolbar. As I noted in my update after receiving e-mail feedback from several readers, it turns out that there is a built-in shortcut for selecting the search field in iTunes, which is only […]
After I wrote about the fact that an exact phrase search (with quotation marks) in Spotlight fails to include plural forms in the search results, I discovered that it was possible to include simple plural forms (i.e. plurals with a simple final “s” appended to the singular) in exact phrase search results by using a […]
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 […]