From the monthly archives:
October 2006
Find and Replace
Find and Replace
Mac Tip #266/25-Oct-2006
One of the essential tools of anyone working with text is Find and Replace, a function available in a great many programs. One MacTips subscriber has pointed out how useful it’s been for her while she’s been training herself to type only a single space after a fullstop.
My reader (who prefers to remain anonymous) writes:
Here’s a thought from someone who has been teaching herself to single space between sentences for a while now and still reverts to an automatic double now and then. You can use the ‘replace’ feature in Word at any stage in a document to ensure consistency. In the ‘find what’ part you put a fullstop followed by a double space and in ‘replace with’ you put a fullstop followed by a single space and then you click ‘change all’. It tells you how many changes its made so you can tell if you are improving!
Of course, the technique isn’t limited to Microsoft Word: try it in any program that lets you enter text.
Some programs (including Microsoft Word) let you use more sophisticated techniques too. The above Find and Replace works fine if you’ve typed two spaces, but what say three or four spaces crept in somewhere? You’d have to run the Find and Replace repeatedly until there were no replacements.
It would be magnificent to be able to look for a fullstop followed by more than one space — and in fact, you can. The next few tips will reveal some of the magic known as Regular Expressions.
Popularity: 8% [?]
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The Tab Stop Quadrille
The Tab Stop Quadrille
Mac Tip #265/18-Oct-2006
Last week’s Tip showed how to press the Tab key once between each column to create columns of text and how to move the Tab Stop to line the columns up.
The Default Tab Stop is usually a Left Tab, but there are actually four types. This Tip explains them and how to decide which one to use. The screenshots demonstrate each type. Click the thumbnails for larger versions.
The four types of Tab Stop are: Left, Right, Centre and Decimal. The screenshots show how each type works. Caveat: if the distance to a Tab Stop is shorter than the length of the text it contains then the formatting will fall apart.
The Left tab is very common. It lines columns of text up against the left edge of the Tab Stop. For example, if you have a Left Tab Stop at 7 cm then any text affected by that Tab Stop will start at 7 cm and stretch to the right.
The Centre Tab is very unusual as it lines the column of text up around the horizontal centre, providing a kind of Christmas Tree effect. For example, if you had a Centre Tab Stop at 9 cm then a shorter word might start at 8 cm and stretch across to 10 cm, while a longer phrase might start at 6 cm and stretch across to 12 cm.
The Right Tab lines text up against the right edge. For example, if you had a Right Tab Stop at 11 cm then all the text affected by that Tab Stop may start anywhere along the line, depending how long it is, but it will not go past the 11 cm mark.
A Right Tab is used occasionally to the left of a left-aligned column to make it easier to visually connect the items in each column, as the screenshot shows.
The Decimal Tab is extremely interesting: it’s designed to line up a column of figures around the decimal point. Because the decimal is the common element in such a column, the eye finds this arrangement very pleasing.
How you actually set the various Tab Stops in your software of choice may vary widely. Now you know what Tab Stops are, and what the various types are called, you can consult the built-in Help files for assistance on how to apply them.
Popularity: 11% [?]
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Eudora moving to Open Source
Today has brought us some big news about Eudora for Mac and Windows. Eudora is going Open Source, effective the first half of calendar year 2007. As an open source product, it will be free to all customers.
Future versions of Eudora will be based on the same technology platform as the open source Mozilla Thunderbird email program.
Today Qualcomm released the last commercial versions of Eudora, version 7.1 for Windows and version 6.2.4 for Mac. The commercial versions will be available until the open source version is available at the discount price of $19.95 and will include three incidents of technical support in a six-month period.
I strongly suggest you read the Press release and FAQ from Qualcomm.
This is a huge, exciting, and I think, welcome, change for Eudora.
Of the email programs I’ve looked at, Thunderbird is the only one I’d consider as a replacement for Eudora. In fact, I use Thunderbird once per month to send an HTML-formatted newsletter. It was the only one I tried which sends without horribly mangling the carefully crafted HTML.
Popularity: 8% [?]
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is jointly authored by Miraz Jordan and Maria Langer.