Line Spacing Problem with Pages
From Jim Stephenson:
Dan,
I don't use Pages, but using high-end page layout programs I've
sometimes run into similar problems, and usually it's due to
accidentally having the wrong types of line breaks at the end of some
lines. Imported text is especially prone to this.
In a multi-line paragraph, lines usually end in one of three
ways...
- Most lines don't have user-specified breaks; they just flow and
break naturally at the end of lines.
- Some lines may end with "hard" breaks (paragraph breaks). These
signal the end of the paragraph, and sometimes result in extra space
being inserted to separate it from the next paragraph.
- Some lines may end with "soft" breaks, which are user-specified
breaks which indicate you want a break there but it's not the end of
the paragraph, so no extra space should be inserted below it.
Weird-looking text can occur when paragraphs contain accidental
combinations of hard breaks and soft breaks, causing inconsistent
spacing.
Imported text seems prone to this, for some reason.
When you get weird line spacing, select the menu item which will
make the invisible formatting characters visible, so you can see where
line breaks are inserted and what kinds they are. Make sure that
paragraph breaks occur only at the end of paragraphs.
Hope this helps,
Jim
Jim,
Thanks for writing. This was text I'd typed in myself,
so I know there were no weird breaks. I'm beginning to wonder if some
software engineer at Apple thought that creating the equivalent of
kerning (adjusting the space between characters for best visual
appearance) for line spacing would be a good idea....
Dan
Jim replied:
"This was text I'd typed in myself, so I know there
were no weird breaks."
Okay . . . but speaking as a professional graphic designer
who does complex type formatting every day, I'd recommend that you
always double-check the line breaks in situations like this.
There may be nothing wrong with them, but it's the first thing you
should check.
View > Show Invisibles
A paragraph break looks like a backwards letter "P"; a soft break
looks like a backwards arrow.
Jim
Jim,
Thanks again. I worked on publishing for 8-1/2 years,
most of that as a book designer using Quark XPress and FrameMaker, all
of those project imported from Word, all of them proofed and corrected
and massaged in Word before the editors even got them to us, and every
project still ended up with things that needed fixing. I got pretty
good at finding and fixing problems. :-)
Dan
Dan,
I worked on publishing for 8-1/2 years...
Sorry, I didn't know your background.
The reason I suspected line break problems is that I run into that
problem fairly frequently in my work (using Quark and
InDesign),
especially with imported text, but it sounds like you've already
checked that out.
By the way, I'm fairly new to your site and enjoy it.
:)
Jim
Jim,
I don't make a big deal of my book design background,
as I now do almost all of my publishing online. In fact, it was working
as a book designer that I worked my way into a Mac IS position, which
paved the way for creating Low End Mac.
Dan
Exact Line Spacing in Pages
Dan,
Your correspondent "Claessens" couldn't find exact line spacing in
Pages 2 because it isn't there. That's right, it took Apple
three tries to get this feature - standard in decent word
processors since ca. 1990 (cf. MacWrite II), as well as in TextEdit
since at least 10.3 - into Pages. And it's still well-hidden in Pages'
Byzantine working interface. As with many other oddities in OS X
(oddities for anyone used to working in the classic Mac OS, as I have
since 1988), I figure it just didn't occur to Apple's current
NeXT-veteran software staff to include it, perhaps until enough people
complained (I filed a bug report - my first ever - re Pages 2) to get
their attention.
Andrew Stone's Create, formerly a NeXT app
now ported to OS X, is an interesting case in point: it has a lot
of nice features, and I was thinking of moving to it for my formerly
PageMaker work, until I discovered that it too lacks exact line spacing
(last time I checked, anyway) - despite that, it's marketed as a page
layout app. I can only guess that exact line spacing was just never
thought of as necessary in the NeXT environment.
I don't have time at the moment to (re)compose a critique of Pages,
so I'll refer you (assuming you're interested) to several lengthy posts
I've done in the last year.
As I said, I've really wanted to like Pages, but every time I've
tried it, it's been a disappointment: bloated, slow, hard to figure
out, buggy. Even on my MacBook Pro, using Pages feels like wrestling
with a large piece of complicated furniture; I wouldn't even try it on
PPC.
Remember when an impressively capable app fit on a floppy disk? What
happened?
I don't entirely understand why developers/publishers so often seem
to have to create entirely new apps from scratch, with entirely new
learning curves, rather than simply improve on the already excellent
app they have, whose user base already knows it well. Maybe it's just
the need to sell us a whole new program for big bucks - although as I
recall AppleWorks 6 was a rewrite-from-the-ground-up of v.5, with no
upgrade path, which nevertheless built on v.5 rather than replacing it
with something different.
Pages is a "replacement for AppleWorks" only because AppleWorks
users simply have no other choice. Yeah, AW will run in OS X - but
for how long? It's already significantly slower in Rosetta on my
MacBook Pro, and its habit of crashing immediately if I don't remember
to switch from my usual Unicode keyboard to the old US keyboard is
really annoying. And, without the anti-aliasing of real OS X apps,
it's ugly on-screen. Etc., etc. But there's really no
replacement for it; even if draw, paint & database apps are added
to iWork, it'll still lack AW's integration.
I have in mind a project to produce a PDF/printable version of an
out-of-print book that I want to share with friends; rather than Pages,
I'm going to try it in NeoOffice, which, though somewhat slow and still
unattractively Windozey in many respects (though the developers have
done a really impressive job with it), seems to be no worse than Pages
and offers the to me huge advantage of working in open formats (.odf),
which I plan to move to as much as possible in future.
The undeserved fate of my two favorite classic Mac apps, AppleWorks
and PageMaker, leaving me with a pile of documents that can't be
accessed easily - i.e. not without buying yet more software (the
bloated and much-inferior-in-usability Pages, and the way overkill and
grossly expen$ive InDesign) which I assume will also be killed off in
their turn for reasons having nothing to do with quality or usability,
creating yet another pile of inaccessible docs - has thoroughly soured
me on proprietary formats.
Open formats, like open-source software, are created and maintained
by the people who use them, who have therefore a real interest
in maintaining their usability into the future - exactly the opposite
of the incentive driving commercial publishers, who need you to buy a
whole new app next year to keep their revenue up.
For this reason, I plan to move to Scribus for the work I've (still) been
doing in PageMaker (the 'Pismo'
PowerBook is a great OS 9 machine); though probably overkill
for my needs (though I'll probably get deeper into it as I learn it),
and still in development and far-from-finished especially in its Mac
version, it's developed and maintained by its own real users, and
constantly improved in response to users' requests and
needs; and, of course, its format is open. (And, though I
acknowledge this is minor point, when doing page layout I much prefer
to work in traditional graphic concepts like leading and points,
instead of "line spacing", etc.)
And, if I ever learn any programming, I'd like to contribute somehow
to these and other open source projects, which I hope will be the
future of computing. I'm tired of corporate ethics (i.e. none but
arrogance and profit) - including Apple's - dominating the computer
world.
Well, enough rant for this morning; gotta get back to work - setting
up a Lombard PB with OS X and wireless for an impecunious user. I
figure, when the economy totally collapses (coming soon to a former
Republic near you, courtesy the New World Order), my skills in keeping
alive old computers will really come in handy.
(BTW, since you're using a Yahoo address, I assume you're aware of
how Yahoo messes up weblinks in email; I haven't found any way to fix
this. So if any of the weblinks in this email don't work, you'll have
to copy, paste and repair them.)
Thanks for a great website; I read it every day.
Andrew Main
Andrew,
Thanks for writing. Yes, the integration within
ClarisWorks/AppleWorks was amazing. Microsoft never came close, and the
iWork suite is a far cry from what I'm used to when still using
AppleWorks on a daily basis.
Thanks goodness Apple offers a 30-day trial of iWork.
It's nice enough and modern, but there's no way I'd spend money for it.
I'll stick with AppleWorks until it stops working.
Yes, Yahoo does some weird things, like ripping URLs
apart and downloading files that somehow lose their extensions, leaving
you to figure out whether it should be a .zip, .sit, or something else.
Frustrating, but I'm used to it - and used to being locked out of the
newest version of Yahoo Mail because I prefer Camino to Firefox and
Safari.
A lot of our likes and dislikes have to do with
familiarity. I like the way I've always worked, so I have little
incentive to move beyond Claris Home Page, AppleWorks, Photoshop
Elements 3 (which took some time to get used to after Photoshop 5.5,
which replaced 4.0), and GyazMail (which is much closer to Claris
Emailer than OS X Mail).
Interesting, isn't it, how much of our reference
software as "old timers" was created by Claris!
Dan
Line Spacing in AppleWorks
From Erik Toft:
Dan,
When you use subscript (like 2 in H2O, where the 2 should go below the base line) in
AppleWorks 6.2.7, the line below gets pushed further down. I don't
think it should, but it does. Word for Win doesn't lower the next line.
To me it seems, that Pages (that I don't have on my low-end clamshell) follow Apple's
standard rather than Windows' (which I prefer in this case).
Yours
Erik
Erik,
You're right, and in a lot of programs (including
browsers), subscripted or superscripted(like
this) text does this. I'm not sure it's a Mac vs. Windows thing,
as Word for Mac works the same way as Word for Windows. The solution in
AppleWorks is to specify line spacing in points rather than lines.
As far as HTML goes, I've created style sheets so that
superscripts and subscripts look better on Low End Mac than they would
otherwise.
.superscript {
font-size:70%;
vertical-align:baseline;
position:relative;
bottom:0.7em;
}
.subscript {
font-size:70%;
vertical-align:baseline;
position:relative;
bottom:-0.3em;
}
Dan
Free Booklet Printing Software
From Matt Berger:
Dan,
I also have the need to print booklets from time to time.
The solution I found was free, easy, and available directly for
download from the Apple website:
Create Booklet - PDF Service 1.0
About Create Booklet - PDF Service
A booklet is a staple of pages that is folded in the middle to be
used like a book. This means the pages have to be re-sorted before
printing and two pages have to be shrunk onto one. Create Booklet does
that for you, and as it is a PDF Service, you can do it directly from
the print panel. Additionally you get the Automator Action that is used
in that PDF Service.
Works fine using Word OS X; will be trying it with NeoOffice as
well. The only caveat is that the margins need to be adjusted to get
the look and feel you want; I'd say for light text chores the default
settings will work fine, but for me - I print catalogs that are pretty
heavy in text - I ended up tweaking until I got the look I wanted.
You've probably already gotten this tip, but just in case.
Bests,
Matt
Matt,
Thanks for the info and the link. I received some info
about CocoaBooklet, but this is the first I've heard of Create Booklet
- PDF Service 1.0.
I'll be sure to try it the next time I have a project
like this.
Dan
Dan Knight has been publishing Low
End Mac since April 1997. Mailbag columns come from email responses to his Mac Musings, Mac Daniel, Online Tech Journal, and other columns on the site.
