On Misbehaving Find-and-Replace Fields

A system-wide spellchecker with autocorrect is a wonderful thing to help you type, but it’s not so great in the text fields of a find-and-replace window.

On Using Special Characters in an Index or Table of Contents in Adobe InDesign

Adobe InDesign has pretty good features for generating tables of contents and indices for documents, but these have a minor limitation that nonetheless can be very awkward: you can only choose from a small selection of special characters to insert into bits of text like the entry separators.

On InDesign CS6’s Undo problems under OS X 10.11

Since the update to OS X 10.11 (which, incidentally, I prefer to not call by its silly sounding nickname), InDesign CS6 displays slightly odd behaviour that probably results from the interaction of Adobe’s and Apple’s code. To whit: you may find you can’t undo more than a few times.

On the Annoying Limits of Bookmarks in iBooks Author

Bookmarks are very useful when you’re making an e-book because they let you define links to them, so the reader can click or tap something and instantly be transported to the bookmark. iBooks Author has all kinds of useful bookmark functionality, but the thing is … for no discernible reason it often falls just short of what you might want to do.

On Dragging and Dropping Images into iBooks Author

There seems to be a very odd bug in iBooks Author that appears if you’re trying to drag and drop images (and perhaps other files) into a large document.

On Importing styles in iBooks Author

For the last two weeks or so, I’ve been using iBooks Author to create an iBooks version of a document I originally wrote in Pages (well, not that exact version — I prefer Pages ’09 for a variety of reasons) and discovered an oddity when importing text. Chiefly, iBooks Author has two ways of pasting text: pasting and changing the text’s style to that of the current paragraph, or pasting and retaining the text’s existing style. Trouble is, neither is very useful if your text is already formatted.