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.

Read more in my new book 'iWork for Mac OSX Cookbook' (2012), follow me on Twitter at iworkinpages, like my page I Work in Pages on Facebook and add me to your circles on Google+

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

Open OpenOffice .odt files in TextEdit.

OpenOffice is a popular free (open source) productivity suite that is roughly equivalent to iWork or Microsoft Office.

iWork can open some OpenOffice documents. For example, click on the Open Office .doc file and it drag it onto the Pages icon in the Dock. The file will open as a Pages document.

However, .odt or .fodt text documents don't open in iWork/Pages.

If you encounter this problem, don't panic. TextEdit, the simple word processor that comes pre-installed  on Macs, can open .odt documents. Click on the file, drag it onto the TextEdit icon in the Dock and it will open.

You can then work on the document in TextEdit or copy-paste it into Pages if needed.

Read about OpenDocument format on Wikipedia here and about OpenOffice here.

Vector. Don't panic.

Here is another of my short reassuring notes for those iWork users, who don't have specialised technical knowledge (which they may not need, anyway).

If you go on an internet forum for help, get bombarded by stern technical questions from the regulars waiting for fresh meat, you can get confused instead of enlightened. Don't.

When you hear about vector graphics that are not mentioned in iWork manuals or help articles, don't panic or despair. PDFs, that iWork is perfectly capable of producing, is as good a vector image as any other. So, ignore vector and concentrate on PDF. The point about vector graphics is that they can be resized without losing crispness. This is usually all you need to know.

Here's a short excerpt from the Wikipedia article on PDFs:

A PDF file is often a combination of vector graphics, text, and bitmap graphics. The basic types of content in a PDF are:

• text stored as content streams (i.e., not text)

• vector graphics for illustrations and designs that consist of shapes and lines

• raster graphics for photographs and other types of image

In later PDF revisions, a PDF document can also support links (inside document or web page), forms, JavaScript (initially available as plugin for Acrobat 3.0), or any other types of embedded contents that can be handled using plug-ins.
...
Two PDF files that look similar on a computer screen may be of very different sizes. For example, a high resolution raster image takes more space than a low resolution one. Typically higher resolution is needed for printing documents than for displaying them on screen. Other things that may increase the size of a file is embedding full fonts, especially for Asiatic scripts, and storing text as graphics.

Read more on Wikipedia about vector graphics here.

The Preview Confusion. (Applespeak)

Apple is famous for using plain English, straightforward language in its manuals and simple names for tools and applications.

However, this same love for simple elegance occasionally leads to confusion.

One example is Preview.

Preview means what it says – view before you use it. View a document before you print or send it, view an application package to see what it is, view an enlarged icon of a file with information about it. Preview is capitalised in windows where it is shown.

But on the same Mac you have an application called Preview. From one version of Mac OS to another it has become an increasingly powerful an versatile programme that opens - and creates - PDFs, opens graphic files and allows photo editing and image manipulation, including cropping, cutting and applying Alpha (transparent background).

In Preview, you can change a PDF to JPEG or PNG. Graphic file formats can be changed from JPEG to PNG and vice versa.

When in print dialogue, click on Preview to check the proof of a document and then save it to whatever file format you need via Preview's own menu.

Because of its self-deprecating name some Mac users still don't realise the full power of Preview.

I don't know if this confusion can be avoided, but I just wanted to point out this quirk of Applespeak. Explore Preview and use it more. 

File Exchange service iWork.com to be discontinued.

Apple has just announced that it is phasing out a few of its internet-based services. The announcement on their website says:

The core services provided by MobileMe have been rewritten to work seamlessly with iCloud. MobileMe will no longer be available as a paid sync service. If you had an active MobileMe account as of June 6, 2011, your service has been extended through June 30, 2012, at no additional charge. After that date, the MobileMe service will no longer be available.

And:

iCloud is free for iOS 5 and OS X Lion users.

Simultaneously, Apple emailed users of the iWork.com informing them that the service will be shut down 31 July 2012. 

For years Apple has insisted on keeping its own mail and file-exchange services on a paid subscription basis. First, it was Mac.com. Then Mac.com changed to MobileMe and iWork'09 suite got a paid file-exchange service called iWork.com. 

Some embraced it, others just ignored these paid services. They hardly offered anything of substantial value that wasn't already available free with Google or Facebook. Large iWork documents, while not accepted by some file-transfer services, can be uploaded to Google Documents. Smaller projects can be shuttled via email in Mac OSX versions beginning with OS 10.5. 

Still, I know serious professional publishers who have been using iWork.com for advertisers to proof their ads. Dropping this service will inconvenience those who have relied on it but in broad terms the step is welcome.

With iCloud becoming free the competition with Google and others enters a new stage.

iWork as a productivity suite continues even though it hasn't been upgraded for desktop computers, while for iOS new updates are being released. I can only suspect that Apple is developing iWork towards wider adaptability for mobile devices such as iPad and iPhone. One important sign of this was the introduction of ePub format to iWork/Pages in 2010. ePub format was designed for internet publishing and is already revolutionising the way publishers operate in a digital world. 

Newer versions of Mac OS, iCloud and iOS will show how this strategy is developing. OSX Mountain Lion is expected to be released in the summer of 2012.

See this previous article: 'Writers United: ePub update for Pages'.

Where is the Euro sign on keyboards.

NB: just checked it for the current Mac OS, it still works (July 2019)

Make of it what you will, but on the French AZERTY keyboard, the Euro is an option for the Dollar. 

And there is a slight difference in the position of the Euro sign in QWERTY keyboard layouts.

In US Qwerty layout, press Option+Shift and type 2:

⌥+⇧+2 = €

In British English Qwerty, just press Option and type 2:

⌥+2 = €

In AZERTY (France) layout, the Euro sign is on the same key as the Dollar sign on the right of the top letter row. Press Option and type Dollar:

⌥+$ = €

On British Qwerty, the dollar is Shift+4 and the pound is Shift+3. However, on US Qwerty, there is no pound at Shift+3. You have to type Option+3.

Why this confusion? Originally, keyboard layouts were developed for typewriters in 1880s and computer keyboards simply adopted the already existing layouts adding new signs as options. 

It's nobody's fault if € or @ are used today more frequently than § paragraph sign. Has anyone used § lately?

Read more in my new book 'iWork for Mas OSX Cookbook' (2012). Follow me on Twitter at iworkinpages, like my page I Work in Pages on Facebook and add me to your circles on Google+.

What to do when text lines are squashed after copy-pasting.

When copy-pasting from a non-Pages document you sometimes get ‘crushed lines’, when there is no interval between the lines and they overlap one another.  Like in the picture.

To return text back to normal, select the whole ‘squashed’ passage, go to Text Inspector and in Spacing>Line click on the drop-down menu under the line spacing value window. 

Change the setting from Exactly to Single. This changes the setting  from points to lines and a measurement of one corresponds to the one-line interval between the lines. In the source document it was probably set in points, not lines. 

The text will now have the usual one line interval between the lines.

And of course – don't panic! Nothing's wrong with the computer or the programme.

The Quirks of Word Processing and Page Layouts.

I've written about the quirky behaviour of documents in Page Layout mode, when Master Object options become unavailable. A reader is asking how to choose between Page Layout and Word Processing modes.

When you open a new document, template chooser should open too prompting you to choose 'blank' from either Word Processing or Page layout. Click on 'blank' under Word Processing.

If template chooser isn't set to open with every new document, under File menu choose 'New from Template Chooser', or type Shift+Command+N.

If you've already done much of your work, it might be wiser to put up with that quirk. If not, open a new document in Word Processing mode and copy-paste your work into it.

Life is not fair!

Colour Viewer Options Disappear

I have a question concerning CMYK in Pages and haven't been able to find the answer. You mention the "slider icon", but my color inspector doesn't have the 4 icons across the top. I opened Numbers, and it has the 4 icons. I'm using iWork '08. Perhaps it just didn't include CMYK in Pages? I'm at a loss. – Cheryl

First, the solution: click on the oblong button in the top right corner of the Colour Viewer (Palette), it opens and closes the different view options, including the CMYK sliders. The same button is in most windows of your Mac, if you run OSX 10.4 version, and it is in iWork ’09 version windows.

What’s the CMYK option for? CMYK sliders give you precise control of colours in your document. If you prepare it for commercial (professional) printing, you can, for example, set the colour of black text to ‘true black’ by setting Cyan, Magenta and Yellow to zero and black to 100 percent. By default ‘black’ in Pages is a composite colour (see picture below) which is a mix of different CMYK colours. It looks good on screen, but in print gets fuzzy. Changing the setting to 100 percent black give text crispness. Even if you are not going to print your project commercially, when you make PDFs from Pages I suggest changing text to ‘true black’.

Composite black

When working in a team, swap CMYK readings of graphic elements in your project to achieve consistent colour sequence.

The Crayons box at top right gives a selection of preset colours with fancy names, like Licorice for black. Click on the colour wheel at top left, drag the little dot around to create a new colour. Click in the rectangular colour window and drag the colour down to the color palette at the bottom of the window to store it if you intend to use it again. If you see a colour or a colour sequence that you like, for instance in one of the templates, store them in the palette and use in your project.

If for some reason the palette disappears, click on the little round ‘handle’ at the bottom and drag it down – the palette will open. 

To open Colour Viewer you can use a keyboard shortcut: Command+Shift+C.

Options closed

And – don’t panic (read other posts tagged 'don't panic') when something suddenly appears or disappears. Usually there is a very simple solution. iWork is intuitive – sometimes it feels as though it knows what you want to do before you yourself know it.

If Master Object Options Are Greyed Out

A reader writes: 


I'm creating a brochure template in Pages and trying to 'place a master object', but the object placement in Format/Advanced is set to 'make master objects selectable' and this along with 'move object to section master' are both greyed out. I also tried 'Inspector - Wrap' all items here are greyed out also. I cant change these settings. I've tried various things but nothing is allowing me to change these options. Please help.

Don't panic: it looks like you are in 'Page Layout' mode. 

Open any document in 'Word Processing' mode and you will see that the options you want are all available. 

If you are creating a new brochure from scratch, open a new document in Word Processing mode and copy/paste what you've already done into the new one. If you are modifying an existing template, copy/paste the elements you want into the document created in Word Processing mode.

I know it sounds silly, but it works.

Snap to Grid Override (Nix Alignment Guides)

To disable 'snap to grid' function, click on the object and hold, press Command as you start moving it.

In user's manual and in Help 'snap to grid' function is described under 'Alignment Guides'.

This is really simple - once you know it. Like in many other Mac-features, Apple 'thinks differently'. Which includes terminology. So, if you are  drawing blanks when you type in a familiar term in Help search window, go instead through the table of contents of the Pages manual and look for a relevant chapter (Working with Images, Shapes, and Other Objects).

With super-fast broadband, Google, Wikipedia and intuitive software, nobody has any patience these days. Still, it would save a lot of time and frustration to settle down and read through, if not the whole manual, then at least the Table of Contents to learn some of Mac glossary (for alignment guides, see Pages'08 User Guide, Chapter 7, p.139 or Pages'09, Chapter 7, p.158) .

I have mentioned the snap to grid override several times in my previous posts, but had never thought of writing about  this little trick separately until some of my readers wrote to say how delighted they were to discover it.

I can't remember now how I myself found it. I suppose, like many others, I was frustrated with objects 'snapping' to align themselves with other shapes on the page when I really didn't want it.

- For example, a photo would snap to the margins of the page,
- or a piece of graphic or clip art would snap to the edges of the coloured box when you want it to be just off the border.
- When you edit a shape by moving editing points (little red dots that appear when you make a shape editable), they try to align themselves with other dots. If it's an original shape with many dots 'snap to grid' can be very annoying.  
- And worst of all, real nightmare, is when you are designing a complex graphic piece with dozens of separate objects, a map for example, and you can't move any, not by a point, without the object jumping to 'align' itself with others.

A radical option is to disable alignment guides altogether in Pages Preferences: uncheck 'Show Alignment Guides'. Preferences panel says 'Show', but it also enables/disables the guides.


There are some other solutions:

- You design a 'Property Box' for an estate agent (realtor) and want a small photo of the property to sit well centered inside the box crammed with text describing the house. Here, it may be best to put the photo as an Inline Object, i.e. anchored into a particular place within the text. Format text to be centered and the photo will be centered as well. If necessary, set the photo to be a paragraph on its own.

-  To move objects without 'snap to grid override': select object and use keyboard arrows.

- Another way of precisely setting the position and to move objects quickly is to change co-ordinates in Metrics Inspector. Select the first object, double click to select the x (horizontal reading), copy, select second object, double click the x reading, paste. Click on x or y up-down arrows to move the object without having to drag it.

Tip: if you use Text Boxes for photo captions and the photo wrapping pushes the text out of the box just use Arrange>Bring to Front to avoid this clash. Read more here

Language: The use of hide/show in Pages manual may also be the source of confusion here. It not only hides or shows, it also disables/enables the snap to grid function.

User Guide'08: To temporarily hide alignment guides, hold down the Command key while you drag an object.
User Guide'09: To momentarily hide guides, hold down the Command key while you drag an object.


Read about the famous marketing slogan 'Think different, think Apple' here.

'Blue conversions' problem and a few workarounds

This problem comes out of the blue and there seems to be no pattern to it happening. An ordinary looking JPG or PDF would not convert properly from Pages to PDF, but instead appear as a solid blue (cyan) shape.

It happens sometimes even when existing graphic elements which had converted successfully before, are just updated. Files made in Illustrator, Photoshop or InDesign could be affected.

I could not find out why this happens or how to resolve this.

If you are struck by the 'blue conversion' problem here are a few workarounds I've used:

- try converting again, sometimes the problem 'just goes away'
- ask the file to be resent to you in high-definition PDF
- try converting on another computer
- if all of the above doesn't work, ditch the file and find a different one which fits with your project.

A friend who works with me said: 'Sometimes it's best not to try and work it out - it fries your brain!'.

Still if anyone has an explanation or a solution I would like to hear very much.

This striking photo of 'champagne breakfast' turned into a solid cyan rectangle after conversion.

Photo by Shu Milne

My Top Pages Shortcut

My favourite shortcut in Pages is this:

Undo - Command+Z

On Macs it allows you to backtrack your changes - all the way to the last Save. In Pages it is particularly useful, because as you work on a layout you may sometimes follow a blind path - make change after change after change and end up hating what you've done. So, to go back where you had veered off, but not right down to the point where you opened a project in progress, you press Command+Z continuously - and start again. Or, in a simpler situation, you mess up something and quickly undo the mess-up.

To me this shortcut also has a deep philosophical meaning. It is somewhere between the magic time machine and the red stop button with which, in my opinion, all automatic devices, experimental projects and human brains absolutely must be equipped.

Whatever you do in life or on your computer - check first if there is an Undo (Command+Z) option or/and a red stop button. You will never regret you'd checked.

Important Update: Current versions of iWork/Pages allow Undo past the last save, not just upt to the point when the document was last saved. Unfortunately, it made redundant my second argument against building Auto-Save option into Pages. 

Check this previous article:
Look after your hands: useful shortcuts

Double-Docking: How To Keep Your Desktop Tidy

Some of my friends complain they find it difficult to keep the desktop free from clutter. When you work on a project or do extensive research on the internet Desktop often becomes littered with dozens of files - notes, stickies, downloads, screenshots, etc.

I must admit that I have a cluttered desktop too. However I found that a simple trick I call double-docking helps to limit if not to avoid desktop clutter. Double docking is putting your work files into the Dock or into the sidebar of your Finder windows.

DOCK I

If you look at the Dock, the strip with application icons at the bottom of your screen (you can put it on the right or on the left of your screen, or make it invisible when not needed), you can see a vertical line slightly to the right of centre.

For a long time I couldn't understand what it was for. By trial and error I found out that applications go to the left and collapsed files to the right.

You can drag your favourite applications to the Dock, left of the vertical stroke, but not to the right of it. And you can also drag files to the Dock, the section on the right of the vertical stroke, but not on the left. Collapsed files stay in the Dock only as long as they are open, but the ones you put in the Dock stay there for as long as you need them at hand. They become aliases of the real files. Switch off your Mac for the night, but your current work files will still be there in the Dock when you switch on again in the morning. So, put your current files in the Dock and move them away from the Desktop to a dedicated folder, Documents for example, to sort later.

When you want to open a file you click on it in the Dock and it opens in the same way as applications launch. When you are finished with that file drag its icon (alias) off the Dock - and it disappears in a puff of smoke, but the file itself stays where you put it.

DOCK II

This not the Dock itself, really, but the sidebar you can open or close in any finder window by clicking on the oval button in the top right corner of window. By default there are Documents, Applications, Desktop and a few other folders.

If you keep your current work files in a particular folder, say Current Project, you can drag that folder into the sidebar to allow yourself direct access to that folder. So if your Current Project folder is inside Documents>My files>Work>Clients>Current Project you can avoid going through numerous folders to reach the one you need by clicking once on it (its alias) in the sidebar.

The same can be done with files: a document you work on for several days or a template of a business letter, a flyer or an email - everybody has a set of documents which basically only need slight changes to be reused again and again. So these can go in the sidebar. When you don't need them anymore, just drag them off the sidebar - and they disappear in a puff of smoke, same as when you drag icons off the Dock. Again, it is only the alias that disappears, the file itself stays where you put it.

If your office has several Macs on a local network, you can put aliases of folders located on other computers in the sidebar. When you click on it your Mac connects to that other computer and opens the folder you need.

Changing items which appear in the sidebar can also be done by choosing Finder>Preferences in the Finder toolbar.

Do I hear people complaining that their Docks and sidebars are cluttered now?

'Blue Stickies'? Don't panic!

New features in iWork/Pages 2008 greatly enhance the programme, but sometimes they pop-up quite unexpectedly and may confuse those who are used to working in a previous version of this programme...

Just as we were rushing to meet deadlines for the July issue of the Rendezvous magazine, there was a moment of panic when Pages threw up clusters of BLUE STICKIES on my partner's computer demanding that she rejects or accepts the changes made in the document. I myself had the same mild shock last month when I first saw how Tracking Changes works, so I already knew what to do.

Under Edit menu go down to Turn off tracking
or click Stop Tracking in the tool Bar

Tracking Changes feature is useful when several people work on a project created in Pages. A journalist writes copy, editor edits it before it is put into a page, designer puts text and graphics together and sub-editor makes changes necessary from the lay-out point of view etc. Or a business proposal is prepared and goes from one department to another, or minutes of a meeting are prepared and moved for checking and approval from one committee member to another. Or costings are calculated and recalculated with charts and graphs added...

Click on Cross button to reject the change,
or click on Tick button to accept it.
This closes the blue stickie.

At each stage there is a possibility of a typo, an error or a disagreement within the team. With tracking each member of the team can see what and where was changed. It is also very useful for proofing. From my correspondence and from discussions on the internet forums I know that smooth teamwork is considered to be essential when deciding whether to use iWork/Pages as the main working software in an organisation. And where a team works tracking changes and commenting on the document is necessary.

However, in many cases, when you work on your own, you don't need tracking and it could be distracting. That's when you may want to switch tracking off.

Tracking works in a similar way to Comments feature with yellow stickies where you just comment on a part of the document without actually changing anything.

Another example of Pages panic is here
and an overview of various methods of sharing and teamwork with Pages,
including local networks and mailing, is here.

Font change mystery solved

There have been a lot of postings on the Internet help forums about problems with fonts and fontbook after arrival of Leopard and new 2008 version of Pages.

I have decided to hold off Leopard until I have mastered the new features in Pages. That way I can see if a problem is related to iWork, and not to the operation system. Installing both new iWork and new OSX would make that more difficult.

• Size of text suddenly shrank to 20-25 % of what it used to be
• Palatino not displayed properly in command+T fonts panel

I have just finished a long session with my computer service provider, Océan Assistance based in Caen, Normandy. We were trying to figure out what had happened to the Palatino font after iWork/Pages 08 installation.

The main difference compared to 06 version was that text suddenly shrank. Every page of my document had 20 to 25 percent more room for text. Another sign of trouble was that Font display panel (Command+T) wouldn't display Palatino properly. While the name of the font was saying 'Palatino' I could see in the display window that it was more like Helvetica (for those who don't know Palatino: it is like a more modern, elegant and sparse version of Times New Roman.)


It wouldn't be such a problem had I used just one machine, but the pages of my project are processed on two machines connected to a small network, so all computers must display pages in exactly the same way - and they didn't. Another concern was that Palatino is the main text font I use in the magazine.

I had blamed the older of the two machines for causing problems, but after extensive checks and trials, we found that it was the new iMac that had corrupt Palatino font files. We compared the pages on our two iMacs and computers and the technician's MacPro laptop. The older Mac and the laptop displayed the page in the same way, while the page on the new iMac was different.

So, Watson, we deduced that the problem was inside the new machine. It took more time to re-synchronise fontbooks, trawl through libraries and plists to find out what had happened. The Palatino font file on the new iMac got corrupted after the iWork 08 installation. The problem was solved after the corrupt Palatino file was replaced by the correct one.

• 112 Kb - corrupt Palatino file size
• 700 Kb - correct Palatino file size

What's also baffling is that iWork was installed on two different machines from the same disc and one got a corruption after installation while the other one didn't. It was especially confusing, because the older machine already had been repaired, so I had less trust in it than in the brand new iMac that I've only been using for three months.


It was a huge relief for me to have this problem sorted, but the question still remaiins: why iWork installation would have created that corruption?

Don't Panic

Two objects won't Group (under Arrange menu.) What's gone wrong?

It happened again to me: panic, two objects won't group...

I was half way to quitting Pages and posting a question on the internet, when I remembered - they both have to be fixed on the page. One of mine was inline.

Go to Wrap inspector,
change inline object to fixed on page.
Group.

So, when you're in a hurry to finish a project, tired and hassled remember: most problems have simple solutions.

Step back and look again at what you're doing.