If you create a Pagemaker document with the page range in Page Setup accidentally set to 1 to 0 pages, you may not notice that you have built your document on the R page! It won’t print. To correct this situation, Select the entire R page. Open a New Pagemaker document with the page range set from 1 of 1 and Paste into page 1 of the new document.
How about three ways to get Postscript letters bigger than 127 points in Pagemaker? Maybe you didn’t know that, contrary to the manual, Pagemaker will let you fill a page with a single character!
• Create text in an object oriented program (MacDraw, MacDraft, etc.) Save azs PICT, import with a Place command in Pagemaker and grab the lower right corner and stretch. Holding the Shift key down preserves proportion.
• Do the same thing without leaving Pagemaker by creating the letters in either Draw or Scribbler. Now Place and stretch.
• Best of all, type the letters directly into Pagemaker. Cut them, Paste into SmartScrap (not the regular Apple Scrapbook). Now use the marquee tool in SmartScrap to select just the letters. Don’t Cut the entire SmartScrap page. Now Cut just the selection and Paste back into Pagemaker. Stretch as desired.
Remember, if you Cut the entire SmartScrap page, you get a text block in Pagemaker, and you can’t stretch text contained in a text block.
If you have a TIFF file and Pagemaker 3.0 refuses to place it, take the TIFF to Image Studio. Save it there as TIFF. Place this one in Pagemaker. Make sure your original TIFF file is available when Pagemaker tries to print the Image Studio version. You will get a bitmapped printout if it isn’t there.
Creating new points in Pagemaker 3.0’s Text Wrap mode uses up beaucoup memory. Save often. Don’t wait for the message that tells you you are permanently locked out of your document. If your document starts acting funny, or a wrap won’t take a new click, Save As… immediately. Do not wait to Pass Go or Collect $200.
Pagemaker loves to screw around with your bitm apped fonts. Some great Imagewriter fonts, which look good printed out on the LaserWriter, act like spoiled children in Pagemaker. Pagemaker tinkers with fonts more than most programs. Of course you can try to fix these fonts. I fixed several this way — others refused to respond to my first aid. To try to fix these fonts, open the FOND resource for the font in ResEdit. Look for Flag Word in the resulting dialog box. Change the first number to a 6.
How do you know if you have problems in the first place? Letters pile on top of each other and then suddenly leave a huge space, then print another letter.
What does “Last Modified” mean in Pagemaker 3.0? Just that you opened and closed your document at that time. That’s all it takes to change the date.
Pagemaker greeks text below six points in size. This is why you see gray lines instead of words sometimes. Greeking lets Pagemaker rebuild a page much faster. When you are not physically editing text, you might want to change this option to greek below 12 points, or something like that. Then change it back when you have to edit the text.
Pagemaker accommodates proportional leading, which lets you mix sizes of type in a single line without those awful spacing problems in the leading.
This is not just a Pagemaker hint, but it is useful there. To move a really tiny object, when the cursor gets in the way so you can’t see where you are placing the object, draw a medium size box out on the pasteboard. Now Shift click the box and your tiny object. Place the cursor on the box and move it. Watch your tiny object. When it is in place, click off anywhere and delete the box.
MacPaint and FullPaint work nicely this way, too. Old MacPaint users (pre 2.0) have a “hot spot” in the lower left corner of the screen. Lasso a small item, then run your cursor around in that corner until it looks like a arrow. Hold down the mouse and drag. The object will move.
If you are a Word 3.0X user, you may have trouble placing tabs in Pagemaker. Nothing happens in Pagemaker until you select the lines to contain the tabs. Just letting the cursor blink in a line won’t let you set tabs for the whole paragraph.
If you manage to get a label stuck in your ImageWriter, some Mac magazines are recommending the use of TV tuner cleaner to dislodge the label. Then feed a piece of heavy card stock backwards through the platen. No guarantees that all the stickum will be removed, however.
The fix for slick and glassy ImageWriter platens in platen and type cleaner at less than $2 a bottle.
Remember when you were warned about what the little magnet in the ImageWriter cover could do to data on floppy disks? Well, here is YAMH (Yet Another Magnet Hint). If you need to remove the cover to print on oversize stock, use a kitchen refrigerator magnet to place over the position beneath the original position of the cover magnet. Keep this magnet away from your disks, too.
MacWrite 5.0 cannot remember Larger Print Area, so if you reopen a document which was printed with Larger Print Area, select it again before printing.
Anyone who has applied for a government job and filled out a SF-171 Form will appreciate Federal Job Link. This $49.95 program provides flexible templates for the SF-171 and various other government forms related to getting a job or a promotion. Washington Apple Pi, publication of Washington Apple Pi, Inc., talked about this program, but listed no vendor.
A nice cheap set of powered speakers for your Mac can be bought through COMB, that liquidator company which keeps sending you catalogs. The pair is $58.50 including postage. The speakers have all sorts of bells and whistles. The sound ain’t Bose and the price ain’t $200, either.
Don’t stand your Mac II CPU on end. Not even if third party manufacturers have built cute little stands for them. Apple says that is a no-no. I believe, I believe!
If you are in ResEdit busily trying to place a space in front of the name of a DA to promote it to the top of your list of 75 DAs in Suitcase, I have help for you. The way to do this is to type Option/Space, not just Space. ResEdit does not like ordinary spaces and won‘t let you successfully do it here.
When you are in a dialog box, you can practically forget the mouse if you want to. Instead of mousing to the choices, MUS Newsletter from the Columbia (MO) MUG lists these keystrokes to use:
• Tab changes Drives
• Command/. (period) Cancels
• Command/Up Arrow moves up one hierarchy
• Command/Down Arrow — ‘tother way
• Return moves down one selection
• Enter also moves down one selection
• Up Arrow moves up one selection
• Down Arrow — yeah, yeah, I know, down one
Didja ever import a graphic in Pagemaker and then couldn’t let text run into the white space around the graphic? Here is the secret: if you use the lasso, only black pixels get captured, and your letters, or another graphic, can show through. If you use the marquee, the white background in the rectangle comes with the graphic. Not that you can’t run text over the white box area if you are sure the text is in front, but it is cleaner and smoother with the lasso.
What is Paste Special for in Excel? It lets you switch which data goes on the x axis and which on the y axis. Just select Rows once, then Columns another time, and examine the difference.
I still run into people who simply reach around and turn off their Macs whenever they feel like it. No, no, no! Quit your program and go back to the Finder (gray desktop), then use Shutdown from the Special menu.
To win more readily in Beyond Dark Castle, use the Tab key when you enter a new screen. This pauses the game so you can look around and get a feel for the territory.
And only one Orb to a sack, please. Mount the Orb on a pedestal at the first opportunity. Another clue: get the East Tower Orb before you get the Fireball from the Wizard. Finally, as in all adventure games, make a map as you proceed. (Thanks, San Diego MUG Resources, home of Silicon Beach Software.)
Smart applications read the formatting coming out of the Scrapbook. Dumb ones don’t. Your Paste will look as good as the target application is smart.
To use nice bold text filled with the pattern, or gray level, of your choice, use Canvas and follow these steps:
• Select the Text tool, the font, the size and the style (bold works best)
• Type your text. Press enter to de-select it
• Select the rectangle tool. Draw a box big enough to enclose the text
• Double click the box. This makes it a Paint object. Use the 72 dpi option
• Use the eraser to remove the lines around the rectangle
• Select the paint bucket tool. Choose a pattern or gray shade. Fill the paint object by clicking the mouse inside of it
• Choose the arrow tool. Select the rectangle
• Align your rectangle over the text.
• Select All and Group.
That gives you patterned, or grayscale text.
The cdev Front and Center (shareware, $10) centers your dialog box over your cursor position.
Here is a list of Option key uses compiled by FatBits, the newsletter of Conejo/Ventura (CA) MUG:
• Initialize a disk as 400K HFS
• Click a close box to close all windows on the desktop
• Select Print in Pagemaker; now select Print Postscript for a file of miniature PageMaker pages which you can then place in another Pagemaker document
• Select a DA in Font/DA Mover to find out how much RAM it eats up
• Click on a close button in Font/DA Mover to eject a disk, or while clicking Quit to eject all disks
• Press with 8 for a bullet (•)
• While starting an application from a disk you want as startup disk
• Opening windows which the Finder will forget are open when you quit
• Dragging locked files, including applications, to the trash to delete them without warning
• With the semicolon for a true ellipsis (…)
• With the hyphen for a true en (–) dash. With the Shift and Hyphen for a true em (—) dash
• While opening the Font/DA Mover to go directly to DAs
• While dragging a file to a new location where it will be duplicated without moving the original (only in a different folder or level)
To get a custom paintbrush in FullPaint, double click the brush tool. Hold down the Command key, select a brush shape and edit it.
MacDraw draws great roads. Draw highways with a wide line. Group them. Duplicate this group. Set the size of the line for this second group a couple of sizes smaller, and make it white. Pull down Arrange menu to Align Objects. Align both T&B Centers and L&R Centers.
Of course with a color printer (got one?) you can select yellow for the narrower pattern, and have a real yellow line down the road. Break it up with black patches of line as needed for intersections, etc.
A better way to manipulate type is Paint programs is needed. You know how your first attempt is never right, and you end up erasing it, or lassoing it and dragging it somewhere. Use Notepad, or any DA text handler which lets you Cut, Copy and Paste. Import your text from the DA. Now, before you do anything else, you can change font, size, style, and the shape of the text block.
For a nice shadow in MacPaint, select the object and give it a single Command/E (Trace Edges).
System Tools 6.0 release is not perfect. Surprise! It has trouble with all but the latest (1.5) Excel. You are limited in how many k you can drag-copy at one time, and 4th Dimension has problems. With SFScrollINIT installed in a Mac II, you get an 01 bomb when you try to move up one hierarchy in a SF dialog box.
If you have a damaged application, the most likely bomb is an ID = 26.
If you browse clip art with DeskPaint, and the images move too slow or too fast, press a number key to speed it up or slow it down. Real handy!
Do you have the Aask INIT? It lets you “turn off” selected INITs during bootup. Guess what? The “turned off” INIT will not work if you now copy it to a friend’s disk. Boot again without fiddling with Aask, and your INITs will be workable and copyable again.
I don’t have muddy blacks on my LaserWriter Plus output! Really? How do I do that? Spray the muddy areas with clear, matte art fixative. I am currently using Grumbacher Tuffilm Fixative, Cat. No. 549, $4.95 for a 12-3/4 oz. aerosol spray can. You cannot believe how much this peps up black areas until you try it. Experiment with the amount of spray. Too little fails to pep up the muddy areas. Too much will spread the toner into white areas. Just right is easy to achieve, however.
Here’s another way to clean away gray desktop from screen dumps in Paint programs. Use Show Page. Now drag the screen dump up and left until the gray desktop is off screen. When you let go of the mouse, anything off the screen is deleted forever. Now repeat in the lower right corner for the other two sides.
Voilá, you have cleaned up all four edges.
Do not keep several versions of a program on the same floppy or hard disk. If you do, each version may take turns screwing with your document. The next time you open it, you may experience real problems.
The right side of the keyboard is not the only location for the mouse. Left-handers often use the left side, feeling this is more normal. However, since keyboard activity is more demanding than mousing, right handers might want to try the mouse on the left side, relieving their right hands for more complicated keyboard duty. Michael Pierce, Portland MUG’s Pagemaker guru and Mouse Tracks editor, says be sure you give this arrangement at least a week before you give up. It takes that long to rid yourself of old right-hand mouse habits.
Do you have a set of “Recovery Disks” ready in case of disaster? These disks should include a good current System and Finder (but not much else in the System Folder), Disk First Aid from Apple, HD SC Setup, Disk Express (or some backup program), a PRAM reset application, and any other good recovery programs you have, such as MacZap, Symantec Tools, or First Aid (the commercial one, not Apple’s).
If you are locked out of your hard disk, you need a way to boot up with the repair tools without spending a lot of time building a repair disk on the spot. Another good idea is to have one disk with Set Startup to a repair application for those occasions when your Mac won’t let you load the Finder.
Make yourself a set of special recovery disks today! These disks will contain System and Finder (but none of that other System Folder stuff) and your disk recovery tools. These may include, but are not limited to some of these:
• Disk First Aid - Apple’s disk repair utility
• First Aid - a more powerful commercial disk recovery program
• Copy II Mac - so you can make a sector copy of damaged floppy disks
• MacTools - has disk recovery capabilities
• Any other tools you may need
When you have a problem is not the time to construct these repair disks. First, you may have locked yourself out of your hard disk. Second, you are upset and this is no time for the clear thinking required to put together a repair kit.
The Mickey Mouse watch DA is likely to cause problems, so take heed.
Spaces and low ASCII-number characters can be used to place your most accessed files at the top of scrolling file dialog boxes. The more spaces as leading characters, the higher up the file goes in the list.
Renumbering a Word 3.0X document (under the Document menu) will show you which lines constitute paragraphs and which do not. If you let a Return sneak in, renumbering will reveal it. Select Remove… to get your normal text back.
MUG newsletters are praising “Working With Word” from MIcrosoft Press. I still like “The Word Companion,” but I don’t doubt that anything is better than Word’s official manual. Is this a con game? Does Microsoft put out hard-to-understand manuals so they can then sell you the Microsoft Press book?
I think maybe yes.
Microsoft Press’ answer to the fact that Microsoft Press books on their products are far better than the MS manuals is to divorce itself from Microsoft. “…not connected…” MS Press says. Microsoft’s failure to “give good manual” contributes to piracy. If you don’t need the manual because a third party book does a better job, it makes it more attractive to pirate the disk(s) and buy the third party book. Most Mac experts contend that good manuals help sell applications. They sure don’t hurt.
If you use Word 3.0X, and can’t remember all of the keyboard equivalents, this will help. The formatting commands user Command/Shift combinations, File and Edit menu selections use unshifted Command key equivalents.
By the way, Word 4.0 will have a drop-down menu listing more than 300 (that’s right, more than 300 — I don’t stutter) keyboard equivalents. You can even access the command from this menu. The word (no pun intended) from low level Microsoft programmers is that Microsoft is trying hard to be a little more Mac-like. Not a lot, you understand — just a little.
More on Word 3.0X’s massive list of keyboard equivalents. Get 4.0. It will have a drop-down menu listing more than 300 command key equivalents. You will be able to execute them from this menu, or just remind yourself once in a while.
Of course I am not looking forward to scrolling to the 299th keyboard equivalent. How will they handle this? Two rows? Three rows? What?
