Trouble with Footnotes in Pages?

A reader has complained about footnotes in Pages. They jump around, especially when long, and drive the man crazy.

I don’t use footnotes much, but have just tried putting a few in a text of mine. 

Pages lets you add footnotes and endnotes. 

- Click in the body of text after the word where the footnote is to be placed.

- Go to Insert menu and slide down to Footnote.

- A small number will appear perched above and to the write of the word and a numbered footnote will appear at the bottom of the page.

What seems to be happening is that, as you add them, footnotes push the main text on the page up and the overflow goes on the next page. If the part of text to which the footnote refers is pushed over onto the next page, the footnote automatically jumps to that page too. 

The numbering stays continuous or changes to restart on each page, as you set it in Document Inspector. You can also change numbered footnotes to less frequently used stars, or Roman numericals, or Greek letters. 

You shouldn’t have much trouble with footnotes in Pages. At least not more than you’d have with using footnotes anyway.

Footnotes are an attribute of academic writing, where every statement or argument you make needs referencing, i.e. an attribution or an indication of an authoritative source. You may see footnotes in encyclopedia articles and legal documents. Sometimes, when a word, a phrase or a section is in a foreign language, you may put the translation in a footnote. Footnotes may also include hyperlinks taking you to a relevant internet page. 

Footnotes are usually placed at the bottom of the page. Sometimes, in order not to distract the reader or when the commentary in footnotes is long, they are grouped together at the end of the document/article/book, or at the end of the chapter (section). In this case they are called endnotes.

See also 'How to subtract footnotes and endnotes from the word count'.

Steve Jobs' Widow Steps Out.

Laurene Powell Jobs.

The New York Times interviewed Steve Jobs' widow Laurene, who until recently has been a very private person. She is rated as the world's ninth wealthiest woman with an estimated fortune of $11.5 bln.

Here are a few excerpts from the NYT feature via Yahoo Finance:

"Two years after Mr. Jobs’s death, Ms. Powell Jobs is becoming somewhat less private. She has tiptoed into the public sphere, pushing her agenda in education as well as global conservation, nutrition and immigration policy. Just last month, for example, she sat down for a rare television interview, discussing the immigration bill before Congress. She has also taken on new issues, like gun control.

"Ms. Powell Jobs is best known in the education field for College Track, which she started in 1997. The group helps prepare low-income students from underserved communities for college, providing rigorous academic training and extracurricular activities. The program, which operates in a number of locations including East Palo Alto and New Orleans, has trained more than 1,400 students and sent 90 percent of them to college.

"Her involvement with immigration flowed from College Track. In its early years, a number of her students in the program were teenagers who had come to the country, unauthorized, at a young age and finished high school, but then could not obtain citizenship or receive any state or federal funds for college.

"Ms. Powell Jobs has a net worth estimated at $11.5 billion, according to Bloomberg, most of it in shares of the Walt Disney Company. Mr. Jobs helped found the animation studio Pixar, which Disney acquired in 2006 and paid for in stock. With 131 million shares, worth about $8.7 billion, the Laurene Powell Jobs Trust is Disney’s largest shareholder with a 7.3 percent stake in the company, and she has benefited from the stock having more than doubled since her husband died in October 2011.

"Mr. Jobs also owned 5.5 million shares of Apple at the time of his death, and it is unclear whether she has sold her position."

And here's a short Bloomberg interview with her and then another video about her fortune.

Photo from the Government of Chile's official website.

How to find invisible objects on a page.

Sometimes your document has invisible objects, text boxes or shapes that affect your work. For example, text starts flowing around an 'underwater rock'. 

This may happen when you work on a continuing project (newsletter, magazine) or use a previously formatted document, customised to your needs, for new documents. Instead of creating a new one you may create a copy via Save as or Duplicate and type over and insert new graphic elements.

When deleting previous elements on the page you may miss an object or two. Leftovers from a previous project without lines, frames and colour fill may stay hiding in you document.

To see if there are any leftovers that you don't need in your current document,

- click away so that cursor is not within text  or click on a floating object;

- type select all: Command+A, or choose Select All from the Edit menu.

- click on the unwanted element to select it and delete.

Applespeak. A Short Glossary.

Cat with apples.

I've written several times here about the confusion some users get into because of Apple's lingusitc policy — the peculiar way Apple develops names for its applications, the wording it uses in manuals and its proclivity to avoid terms that other major computer companies use and that have long become familiar to computer users all over the world. (See this article on Preview and this on Alignment Guides/Snap to Grid.)

Here's a short glossary of Apple's terms and corresponding terms in general circulation.

Alignment guides - Snap to Grid.
Alignment guides function is in Preferences > Rulers Preferences.

Draw tool/Pen - Bezier pen.
Used to make free (custom) shapes. The word Pen does appear at the end of Insert > Shape menu)

Spacing (Character) - Kerning.

Allows to 'tighten' or 'loosen' text by shrinking or expanding the distance between letters/characters. Useful in graphic design and in getting rid of hanging lines when laying out text. In iWork, it is in the Text Inspector.

Pop-up menu - Drop-down menu.

PDF - Vector. 

PDFs are a type of vector graphics. Don't feel intimidated if you know how to make PDFs in iWork but don't know much about vector graphics in general. (See this previous article Vector. Don't panic.)

Editing points - Anchors. 

These are the red dots that appear when you make a shape editable. 

Preview on Macs is a PDF reader/creator as well as preview/quick view for files.

Bubble (or Comment Bubble) - Sticky. 

There is a small application on Macs called Stickies, small notes for jotting down reminders and quick notes. The problem is, on screen they look exactly like 'stickies' that appear on the margins of a document when you comment on it.  So, instead of sticky, the manual calls them 'comment bubbles', which may be slightly confusing because they have right angles and don't look like rounded bubbles. 

Send me confusing terms and phrases that you've noticed, I'd be glad to add them to this glossary.

Photo ©A.Anichkin. My cat Vassily with too many apples.

More Runners Drawings.

I've made a few more runners, this time in colour and featuring both a man and a woman. All drawings are a combination of lines drawn with the Pages Draw tool (or Pen).

The brown colour is Cayenne and the grey is Steel from Crayons in Colour Viewer. The blonde woman's hair is a slightly modified Banana, and the dark haired woman's hair is Licorice.

The colour of the shadow in some drawings is a real human skin colour I picked off a photograph. The background rectangle is also coloured with varying shades of human skin off a photo (Graphic Inspector > Advance Gradient Fill > Radial Gradient Fill.)

All designs ©Alexander Anichkin. Contact the editor if you'd like to commission one like this.

 

The Runner. How to draw a logo.

I took part in the May Day 10 km road race in Avranches, Normandy. While pottering about at the start line I noted club logos on runners' vests. After coming back home I've made my own. Here it is.

It's made of four curving lines. To draw a line in Pages, choose the Draw tool from the Shapes menu (or Insert > Shape > Draw with Pen). Click two or three times and double-click on the last dot to create a draft line. Then make it editable: Format > Shape > Make Editable, and then give it smooth curves: Format > Shape > Smooth Path.

Move the red dots - editing points - to give the lines desired shape. Each editing point when selected shows curving handles. Click and drag to change the curves of the line.

At some point choose a style for your lines and give them colour. It could be right when you begin your design or at some point later. A choice of styles is in Graphic Inspector under Line. Click on the drop-down menu and see which of the styles suits your design best.

 The picture below shows one of the line being edited.

Black Ribbons at London Marathon.

Six days after the Boston Marathon bombings over 35 thousand people ran in the London Marathon, 700 thousand cheered them on in the streets and Prince Harry, who fought in Afghanistan, presented medals at the finish. Many held up posters saying 'Boston, we are with you.' 'We shall never surrender' to the terrorists, was the message.

As a sign of solidarity in grief many wore small black ribbons. In case you want to put a black ribbon on your website, avatar or any other document, here is a sample I designed in Pages.

The ribbon consists of three rectangles I imported from the Shapes menu.

Next step is to make the rectangles editable: Format > Shape > Make Editable. Then, Format > Shape > Smooth Path. Do it with each rectangle.

When the rectangles are editable they show red dots — editing points. Drag them to change the shape of the rectangle.

When you Smooth Path of the editable shape, each editing point, when selected, also shows propeller-like curving handles. Drag these to change curves.

In Graphic Inspector, select either Gradient Colour Fill or Advanced Gradient Colour Fill. Choose complementing shades of black and dark grey to give the shapes volume. Add shadows.

Send the shape at the top, that represents the bend in the ribbon, to back: Arrange > Send to Back.

The shape on the right should be at the front: Arrange > Bring to Front.

Move the shapes with the mouse or keyboard arrows together to form the image of the ribbon.

When finished turn your Pages document into an image, PDF, JPEG or PNG. Remove the white background with the Alpha tool in Preview. Now you can use it in your projects.

The picture on the right shows the ribbon with editing points selected.

You can also make a ribbon with the Draw Tool, the last option in the Shapes menu. Read this earlier article on I Work in Pages: 'Draw your Awareness Ribbon in iWork.'