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Your Mellifluous Mac
Your Mellifluous Mac
Mac Tip #344, 25 June 2008
Do you find your Mac’s ‘voice’ grating? You may have tried listening to your Mac reading a document aloud, if you followed last week’s Tip, What’s black and white and heard all over?, Mac Tip #343, 18 June 2008.
Perhaps you found it all too ‘computery’ and decided it wasn’t for you.
Well, try tuning up the voice and have another go. You may change your mind.
Go to System Preferences > Speech > Text to Speech, and select a System Voice from the pop-up. Then press the Play button to hear a sample. Alex is pretty smooth, but my preference is for Vicki.
Some of the Novelty voices from earlier versions of the Operating System have been hidden in Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5). Choose Show More Voices to see the whole selection.
Next try speeding the voice up or slowing it down. Move the Speaking Rate slider to the left to slow down the voice, and to the right to speed it up. Press Play to hear a sample.
Once you’ve found the settings that seem pleasing to you, try selecting some text, perhaps in Safari, and have your Mac read it to you. A short sample is all very well, but only an extended selection will really give you an idea of whether the speed is right for you. I prefer to listen to Vicki just a little faster than Normal.
Some third parties make additional voices you can buy, for example, Infovox iVox and Cepstral.
Their voices also extend the range with UK, Spanish and other voices, rather than just US. No Kiwi voices though. The demo voices on their websites sound good, but I’m happy with Vicki myself.
Popularity: 22% [?]
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What to do with the Num Lock Key
What to do with the Num Lock Key
Mac Tip #342, 11 June 2008
What does the Num Lock key on your keyboard do? Does your keyboard even have a Num Lock key? What is it? Where is it?
The Num Lock key, long overlooked and neglected, is in the opinion of many a total waste of space. I tend to not only agree with that, but go a step further and say that it’s a nuisance.
But in the interests of keeping the readers of MacTips well informed this whole Tip is dedicated to Num Lock. After all, why can’t it have its 15 minutes of fame?
Look hard at your keyboard. Is there one key that says ‘num lock’? On my MacBook Pro that key is the F6 key at the top of the keyboard. When I press it a green light shines through it, in the way the Caps lock key on my keyboard lights up.
If you have a very new Mac or keyboard, you might not find a Num Lock key, as Apple seem to have finally done away with it.
If you do have a Num Lock key, scrutinise your keyboard again and look very closely at the following keys: j, k, l, ;, m, ., /, u, i, o, p, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0, -. Do you see that each has not only the usual one or two characters, such as / and ?, but also a very tiny additional symbol in the bottom right corner?
I took a photo of my MacBook Pro keyboard, and drew outlines round the relevant keys. Click the thumbnail for a larger version.
The first time I really noticed the Num Lock key was when I’d pressed it by accident and suddenly my computer behaved strangely — I was typing and mainly nothing happened, except occasionally a number would appear.
It was mysterious. I did standard troubleshooting, such as quitting the application and restarting the computer. Finally I noticed and wondered about the extra green light I’d never spotted before. When I disengaged the Num Lock, everything returned to normal.
When you engage the Num Lock key it deactivates most of the standard character keys, and allows you to type that third character that appears on the group of keys I mentioned before. If you do lots of number work that may be easier than stretching across the top of the keyboard all the time.
If you want to quickly type that third character you can even do it without engaging Num Lock. If you have an ‘fn’ key on your keyboard (most Mac laptops should have one) hold it down and try typing. Most keys type the character you’re probably used to, but those numeric keypad keys produce that third character — asdfgh123-' instead of asdfghjkl;'.
Try it, if you have the Num Lock key, and see for yourself.
There’s no screencast this week as there’s nothing to show, except me typing a few letters and numbers. Feedback has been good on the last few screencasts, but I’m still keen to hear from more readers and viewers. Please leave your comments in the online archive.
Popularity: 32% [?]
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Paste and Match Style
Paste and Match Style
Mac Tip #333, 09 April 2008
Here’s an annoyance that often strikes me. While doing research I may copy text from a web page or other source. When I paste that text into Keynote or Pages, it arrives complete with whatever fonts, sizes and colours it had in the web page and no longer fits with my carefully designed presentation.
This affects other programs too, where you can ’style’ text by changing fonts, colours, sizes, bold, italics, and other characteristics.
The screenshot shows what happened when I copied the word Petroglyphs
from a web page and pasted in to a slide: the font and colour were totally wrong.
Don’t just Paste, Paste and Match Style
Many programs give you the option to Paste and Match Style, or Paste Special, or Paste With Current Style. When you choose that option (often the keyboard shortcut is Command Option Shift v) what you’re pasting loses its own formatting and picks up characteristics from the destination.
The second screenshot shows how my paste looked after choosing Paste and Match Style — the font, colour and size are a perfect match.
If this problem strikes you, look in the Edit menu of the program you’re pasting into and see if you can paste and match the style of the destination. It may save you a lot of hair pulling.
Popularity: 39% [?]
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is jointly authored by Miraz Jordan and Maria Langer.