[Thain Esh Kelch]

Could any developer with access to the latest beta tell me what new things there are in TextEdit? Im especially interested in knowing if forms made the cut this time...

[Millennium]

If forms made the cut, then wouldn't they be a part of Preview, not TextEdit?

[zachs]

Table support.

[cpac]

Originally posted by zachs:
Table support.

Purple bananas.

[siMac]

Originally posted by cpac:
Purple bananas.

Yes! Finally, purple banana support.

They must have got my feedback...

[MasonMcD]

http://www.masonmcd.net/TigerTextEdit.jpeg

http://www.masonmcd.net/MoreTigerTextEdit.jpeg

[Love Calm Quiet]

Mason, those are some very promising features.

I guess now we know where the development resources NOT going to AppleWorks ARE going!

[voodoo]

How sneaky of Apple. Making TextEdit a usable word processor. At least good enough to get by.

OffTopic: Now how about a Keynote update?

[Randman]

Looking more and more impressive.

The jpg shows a tab saying delete backup. Is this an auto-save feature or something else?

[Millennium]

Originally posted by Love Calm Quiet:
Mason, those are some very promising features.

I guess now we know where the development resources NOT going to AppleWorks ARE going!

Nifty, but the word processor is only one part of AppleWorks. What do they intend to do for spreasheets or graphics?

[monkeybrain]

I think they should also include a Textedit like app for graphics, I mean something you can draw in, something basic but fun to play around with.

Table support is going to be great, lots or formatting options with that. But are files still saved as RTF? Can RTF support tables?

[Amorya]

Footnotes? Headers/footers? If they're in there, we're set

[Thain Esh Kelch]

Originally posted by Millennium:
If forms made the cut, then wouldn't they be a part of Preview, not TextEdit?

Whoops, I meant tables (Which was answered)! English is only my second language..

Originally posted by Amorya:
Footnotes? Headers/footers? If they're in there, we're set

How about this one then?


But tables... w0000t!!

[Millennium]

Originally posted by Amorya:
Footnotes? Headers/footers? If they're in there, we're set

The RTF format is capable of handling these, as well as tables. The question is, will TextEdit support them?

[cpac]

last I saw, TextEdit did not support these - or at least not fully. There's an option for including page numbering, but it was set in preferences, and not via a footer interface.

I'd love it if these features were added though...

[MasonMcD]

Originally posted by Millennium:
The RTF format is capable of handling these, as well as tables. The question is, will TextEdit support them?

Not currently. I tried inserting a footnote into a Word doc, then saved as RTF and opened in TextEdit.

No love.

The footnote appears in a .doc opened in TextEdit, but only appended in-text.

http://www.masonmcd.net/TextEditLorem.jpg

[Love Calm Quiet]

Millenium: Rumor has it that spreadsheet work will have to wait until the release of the pending "iPodOffice" - hopefully by Q5 2006.

Articles in the Rolling Stone suggest that Apple is developing this option - rather than ever putting one on a Mac for fear of offending God on HI (or His angelic forces in Redmond).

[MacGorilla]

Page numbering...about time!

[futurehead]

Hi,

Can anyone with the tiger textedit see if this really annoying behaviour has been fixed?


Try the following:

Take some paragraph of text in textedit and set the line spacing to be exactly 14 points (or whatever). Select a character somewhere in the middle of the paragraph and apply a superscript. The character will move upwards, as expected, and the line spacing will stay exactly the same. Now do the same with subscript. This time, the selected character stays put (exactly in line with the remaining text) but the line it is on moves up! There is something fundamentally wrong with this. I get the same behaviour in other cocoa applications (e.g. create).

This problem is really bugging me, as it makes text edit useless for scientific documents that are full of subscripts and superscripts.

Am I doing something stupid, or is this a fundamental bug in apples text handling? I've sent feedback to apple, but have they fixed it?

Cheers


Futurehead

[Chuckit]

Originally posted by futurehead:
Take some paragraph of text in textedit and set the line spacing to be exactly 14 points (or whatever). Select a character somewhere in the middle of the paragraph and apply a superscript. The character will move upwards, as expected, and the line spacing will stay exactly the same. Now do the same with subscript. This time, the selected character stays put (exactly in line with the remaining text) but the line it is on moves up! There is something fundamentally wrong with this. I get the same behaviour in other cocoa applications (e.g. create).

On my computer (10.3.5), superscript moves the line down while the character stays put, and subscript moves the character down while the line stays put but the next line shifts down instead. Which sounds quite a bit different from the behavior you're describing. Not sure whether you like it better or worse.

[futurehead]

Originally posted by Chuckit:
On my computer (10.3.5), superscript moves the line down while the character stays put, and subscript moves the character down while the line stays put but the next line shifts down instead. Which sounds quite a bit different from the behavior you're describing. Not sure whether you like it better or worse.

This is what happens with line spacing set to be 'single'.

To see what I describe you need to set the spacing to 'exactly' - i.e. in the line spacing menu choose 'other...' and then click the 'exactly' button. Either way, the way line spacing with sub and superscripts is currently handled is bonkers.

Any one with tiger try this yet?

Cheers

Rich

[itai195]

Originally posted by Millennium:
Nifty, but the word processor is only one part of AppleWorks. What do they intend to do for spreasheets or graphics?

That's what the purple banana support is for. I mean seriously, sometimes you people drive me batty!

TextEdit >> WordPad

[Superchicken]

Apple should look at making TextEdit into something more useful for us students. Think auto note support kinda like in Word, and throw in a GOOD foot note system. Also a helper for different writing formats. APA, Turabian, MLA etc. If Apple made something that would check your citations I could sell OS X to EVERYONE on campus.

[Chris O'Brien]

Originally posted by futurehead:
Hi,

Can anyone with the tiger textedit see if this really annoying behaviour has been fixed?


Try the following:

Take some paragraph of text in textedit and set the line spacing to be exactly 14 points (or whatever). Select a character somewhere in the middle of the paragraph and apply a superscript. The character will move upwards, as expected, and the line spacing will stay exactly the same. Now do the same with subscript. This time, the selected character stays put (exactly in line with the remaining text) but the line it is on moves up! There is something fundamentally wrong with this. I get the same behaviour in other cocoa applications (e.g. create).

This problem is really bugging me, as it makes text edit useless for scientific documents that are full of subscripts and superscripts.

Am I doing something stupid, or is this a fundamental bug in apples text handling? I've sent feedback to apple, but have they fixed it?

Cheers


Futurehead

Using 8A294:

Disappointing, eh?

[cpac]

Originally posted by Superchicken:
Apple should look at making TextEdit into something more useful for us students. Think auto note support kinda like in Word, and throw in a GOOD foot note system. Also a helper for different writing formats. APA, Turabian, MLA etc. If Apple made something that would check your citations I could sell OS X to EVERYONE on campus.

ok, there are hopes/wishes, and then there are pipe dreams...

Apple's not about to start writing citation checking software - let's just hope we get footnotes in TextEdit eventually.

[Millennium]

Originally posted by Superchicken:
Apple should look at making TextEdit into something more useful for us students. Think auto note support kinda like in Word, and throw in a GOOD foot note system. Also a helper for different writing formats. APA, Turabian, MLA etc. If Apple made something that would check your citations I could sell OS X to EVERYONE on campus.

Even Word doesn't do that, last I checked. There is software out there which does what you want, but I don't think you'd like it very much. It's called LaTeX (its makers are very particular about that particular capitalization). It does everything you're asking for and more, plus it produces truly wonderful-looking documents (there's a Mac version out there which even does most of the cool ATSUI stuff like auto-ligatures) but it's not WYSIWYG.

[itai195]

Originally posted by Superchicken:
Apple should look at making TextEdit into something more useful for us students. Think auto note support kinda like in Word, and throw in a GOOD foot note system. Also a helper for different writing formats. APA, Turabian, MLA etc. If Apple made something that would check your citations I could sell OS X to EVERYONE on campus.

First lets get professors to agree on wtf MLA is. I've had at least three that insist on MLA yet all add their own quirks.

[Superchicken]

If Apple is going to be marketing the eMac and iBook at edu they should add these features. Simply because Word doesn't include them means nothing. Either that or they should make a TextEdit Pro, or something, that would actually be very useful for writing papers. Allow you to save templates and all sorts of things. The Word Processor hasn't been innovated in years, but if they asked people who have to use them all the time what features they'd like I'm sure they could come up with tons.

[nforcer]

Originally posted by itai195:
First lets get professors to agree on wtf MLA is. I've had at least three that insist on MLA yet all add their own quirks.

Yes, MLA is a bunch of crap. But then again so is essay and report writing in general. Too bad I have yet to get any teacher to agree with me on the "paragraph summary" format.

[MPMoriarty]

Well can't you create templates by checking the "stationary pad" option in a textedit file's Get Info dialog. This isn't exactly like a template, but it is similar.

[- - e r i k - -]

Originally posted by itai195:
First lets get professors to agree on wtf MLA is. I've had at least three that insist on MLA yet all add their own quirks.

MLA?

[Amorya]

Originally posted by Millennium:
Even Word doesn't do that, last I checked. There is software out there which does what you want, but I don't think you'd like it very much. It's called LaTeX (its makers are very particular about that particular capitalization). It does everything you're asking for and more, plus it produces truly wonderful-looking documents (there's a Mac version out there which even does most of the cool ATSUI stuff like auto-ligatures) but it's not WYSIWYG.

Re LaTeX, it actually should be in greek letters... TeX is tau-epsillon-chi (hence being pronounced Tec not Tex).

I'm learning it at the moment, for psychology essays. Get Bibdesk and iTeXMac, and you're set. You get a GUI for editing your references, and drag-and-drop to insert one. You still need to have some idea about LaTeX commands, but there's popup menus for frequently used ones and stuff.

If I ever really get a handle on Cocoa, I'm envisioning making a no-commands-required front-end for LaTeX. Basically it'd have pallettes of stuff you could use (like headers, tables, figures etc), and you'd be able to plop them down in order. It still wouldn't be WYSIWYG, because then people might (eg) up the font size instead of using a proper header, but you'd see all the items for your document as rounded semitransparent rectangles.


Amorya

[Simon]

Warning, going OT here.

For those of you who are starting to get comfortable with LaTeX (a true godsend btw) on the Mac, you shouldn't be without TexShop. Next to using command line latex and vi IMHO it's the best. It works, it's thin and and it's free.

And for those of you in science that don't use LaTeX, well, you should.

I actually got my g/f (she's a psychologist) to learn LaTeX even though every other staff member at her institute believes word processing = MS Word. She started to love LaTeX after half a day and she hasn't used Word ever since.

Amorya, since you're doing psychology, have you discovered apacite yet? I've been told it rocks.

[JLL]

Originally posted by Superchicken:
Apple should look at making TextEdit into something more useful for us students. Think auto note support kinda like in Word, and throw in a GOOD foot note system. Also a helper for different writing formats. APA, Turabian, MLA etc. If Apple made something that would check your citations I could sell OS X to EVERYONE on campus.

TextEdit basically just shows what is available in Cocoa's text services.

[Amorya]

Originally posted by Simon:
Amorya, since you're doing psychology, have you discovered apacite yet? I've been told it rocks.

Yup - installed it a few weeks ago. Thanks for the heads up though - you're right, it does rock!

[/OT!]


Amorya

[squilla]

Originally posted by - - e r i k - -:
MLA?

MLA = Modern Language Association, the professional association for literature (mostly English) professors. Among other things, they publish a journal, Publications of the Modern Language Association (PMLA), which requires footnotes in a standard style.

As with most standards, the style doesn't cover all the possibilities, so there are legitimate variations. This irritates many bibliography programs, most bibliographers, all bibliography programmers, and some others.

Squilla

[futurehead]

Originally posted by Black Book:
Using 8A294:

Disappointing, eh?

Yes, extremely dissapointing. All this talk of using TextEdit as a word processing replacement is a load of rubbish if apple still can't get something as basic as line spacing correct.

The fact that the same error occurs in other apps implies that this is a fundamental error in the way os x handles text. I'm surprised that more people haven't made a fuss about it. Do most people get by without using subscripts and superscripts?

Cheers

Futurehead

[cpac]

Originally posted by futurehead:
Do most people get by without using subscripts and superscripts?

Yes.


----------------------


[OT citation software point]
The legal profession has had, and continues to have extensively documented and standardized citation formats. Companies (Lexis and West) have written software that attempts to check these citations for format as well as accuracy. The problem is, the software is imperfect, and generally, you have to go back and check everything again to make sure it's correct.

My point is that if companies which charge pretty much every law firm on the planet vast sums of money aren't able to turn that money into reliable software (they'd be able to get even more money if it really worked), then Apple is extremely unlikely to make this part of TextEdit or even a more "profession" word processing app.

Innovation in word processing is welcome, but I don't think that citation format support is a direction it should go...
[/OT citation software point]

[jamesl]

hi

Does this mean that the next version of text edit will include support for tables?

Why are apple not developing appleworks 6 into a tool which can underline spelling errors, like text edit can?

I think that appleworks needs to be developed soon. Anybody got any informstion on this?

[cpac]

Originally posted by jamesl:
hi

Does this mean that the next version of text edit will include support for tables?

Why are apple not developing appleworks 6 into a tool which can underline spelling errors, like text edit can?

I think that appleworks needs to be developed soon. Anybody got any informstion on this?

Yes. The next version will have some support for tables.

I believe you can have underlining of spelling errors in Appleworks - it's just not the same kind as the system uses. Check the preferences...

Everyone thinks that Appleworks is a sorry excuse for an OS X application and that if it is going to continue to be viable, Apple must improve it substantially soon. However, that's a big if. It's not at all clear that Apple is going to put any resources at all into Appleworks development: it's been a number of years with no improvement, and there are plenty of other options out there including Word, Nisus Writer Express, Mellel, etc. (not to mention all those available via open-source projects - the various flavors of OpenOffice, NeoOfficeJ, AbiWord, etc....

[Superchicken]

You know if Apple developed a nice package like iLife but say eStudent or something, I think they could do some serious stuff. Think about it, a Word Processor and set of tools designed for students specifically! I could sell that to so many people here at college. Have the ability to take your notes with your on your iPod. Throw in support for finding other eStudent users over WiFi for iChat, sharing notes via rendezvous, throw in basic things something like a wizard for making in text citations and foot notes, make those extensible and include the common ones for citing books, websites etc. Make them editable. Even allow for duplications for example say I have one Prof who thinks Turabian HAS to be this one way when it doesn't but I don't always remember that, I could create a specific format for that prof and edit the things that they change.
Imagine for example if all the Mac users in Old Testament could easily see that other students had notes available for the classes they missed. You could password protect, leave open, or you could require authorization via iChat.
This would be great to bundle on all iBooks, eMacs, and iMacs, (and at least on 12 inch PowerBooks ) Add the ability to archive assignments and what not. Include a basic graphing program, and maybe a few things like a better calculator and stuff and you'd have a sweet package. Throw in Keynote and you have a not exactly an office competitor but certainly another option for students that can show off just how well Apple can do things.

[DeathMan]

Originally posted by Superchicken:
You know if Apple developed a nice package ..longnded...another option for students that can show off just how well Apple can do things.

It is sad that we always seem to look to Apple for good software solutions. Hopefully as new and existing software developers become fluent in these various technologies, we won't be so dependent on Apple for the goods. To those who are currently already doing this, I want to say thanks. I hope you will write more cool software so I can buy it.

(Edited for clarity and congratulations)

[Thain Esh Kelch]

Originally posted by DeathMan:
It is sad that we always seem to look to Apple for good software solutions. Hopefully as new and existing software developers become fluent in these various technologies, we won't be so dependent on Apple for the goods.

Actually, a lot of shareware programs have appeared the last few years that'll cover most niches! Most people are just afraid to look at shareware, because they expect to get apps that are of less quality than Apples own software. And in MANY cases, the software is actually better than what Apple releases.

[Superchicken]

Originally posted by DeathMan:
It is sad that we always seem to look to Apple for good software solutions. Hopefully as new and existing software developers become fluent in these various technologies, we won't be so dependent on Apple for the goods. To those who are currently already doing this, I want to say thanks. I hope you will write more cool software so I can buy it.

(Edited for clarity and congratulations)

True, but the only real text editor option is Microsoft, we have no other real Mac Devs that could roll out this sorta thing quickly. Unless a big company like Novel or someone decides to randomly enter the consumer Mac software scene. Essentially most of the tittles that are worth buying for the Mac are either made by Apple or they're Graphics apps

[Simon]

Originally posted by Superchicken:
True, but the only real text editor option is Microsoft, we have no other real Mac Devs that could roll out this sorta thing quickly.

I wish Omni Group would just write OmniWorks as a successor to AppleWorks 6. Looking at AppleWorks and MS Office makes you want to cry (albeit for different reasons).

[cpac]

There's a lot wrong with your logic here Superchicken:

You're basically asking for a single package which is (1) a word processor, (2) a customizable citation checker, (3) note-taking app (if different from the word processor), (4) rendezvous file sharing.

The thing is, all these pieces exist in separate forms already, except for maybe (2).

(1) word processors:
Word
AppleWorks
Nisus Writer Express
Mellel
OpenOffice (in all its different incarnations)

(2) customized citation checking:
Does EndNote do this?

(3) note-taking apps:
(word processors listed above)
OmniOutliner
Hog Bay Notebook
zillions of others

(4) rendezvous file sharing:
It's called the Finder.

Given that all of this is out there already I think it's unlikely Apple's going to put together a redundant software package - and why would such a package be any more attractive to students than what's already available? (Yes, I know you think that a citation checker would be *the* killer app - but I never once needed one in my college career, and those that have been built for the legal profession have failed miserably - there's no reason to think another would be any different).

[Chuckit]

Originally posted by Superchicken:
True, but the only real text editor option is Microsoft, we have no other real Mac Devs that could roll out this sorta thing quickly.

How are Mellel and Nisus Writer not "real"? (Also, I believe you mean "Word processor," because Mac OS X comes with a perfectly usable text editor.)

Essentially most of the tittles that are worth buying for the Mac are either made by Apple or they're Graphics apps

If you have a very limited range of interests, I guess. I wouldn't say Apple creates magic super-apps. I have more faith that the next version of OmniOutliner will kick ass than the next version of iPhoto.

[Boondoggle]

Originally posted by Superchicken:
True, but the only real text editor option is Microsoft, ...

Just for the record what I think you mean here is word processor. There are lots of text editors out there, BBedit being one of the best.

Text editing does not equal word processing in fact and by convention.

bd

[Thain Esh Kelch]

Originally posted by Chuckit:
If you have a very limited range of interests, I guess. I wouldn't say Apple creates magic super-apps. I have more faith that the next version of OmniOutliner will kick ass than the next version of iPhoto.

Agreed. And it is mostly because Apple tend to put features in their apps and call it a .5 release, while normal companies would release a .1 update.

[Zadian]

Will Text Edit in Tiger support different print margins? In Panthers TextEdit the margins are fixed at 24mm.
There is a hack to change this in a document, but it would be very nice to do this directly in TextEdit.

And is there an easy way to instert page brakes in Tigers TextEdit? This can be done in Panthers TextEdit by using 2 shortcuts (ctrl-Q and then ctrl-L) but then again, it would be much easier to have a menu option to archive this.