If a LaserWriter II NTX fails to print the last several lines in a paragraph, go to the Print menu and make sure Fractional Widths is turned off, not on. (Thanks, Apple Link.)
In Word 3.0, if you want a selected paragraph without the indent present in the rest of the document, hold the Command and Option keys down and press N and M in that order.
Or center the selected paragraph by holding down the Command and Option keys and pressing N, M and C.
What happens is that the N nests the material, and the M removes all indentation. Adding the C centers material which would otherwise conform to the justification of the rest of the document.
Word 4.0 adds more convenience by letting you use Command/M followed by an additional letter which would ordinarily require ANOTHER Command/(other key) sequence. For example, Command/M,B selects the Paragraph dialog box in the Formats menu, then selects the paragraph borders item in that dialog box.
This belongs in the hints! Long Island Computer Association, which I flail regularly for their front page IBM "art," has a nifty idea.
They send their newsletter, Stack, on a floppy disk to physically handicapped persons. The person sends in a blank disk, and the club returns it with Stack on it.
Any MUG interested should know the rules:
The disk can be sent free, IF:
1) There is no advertising on it, and
2) The material is either Braille, large print, or magnetic media.
Where the stamp normally appears, these words must appear:
FREE MATTER
FOR THE BLIND
AND PHYSICALLY
HANDICAPPED
It's that time again! A principal cause of weirdness on a Mac with a hard drive is TWO OR MORE Systems on the hard disk. Get out Find File, type in System, and go hunting.
You can have some color in HyperCard 1.2.2 if you have a Mac ][ or better with two megs of RAM. Get Color Card from Drexel U., $39.95, MacLaboratory, c/o Bob Bluss, 314 Exeter Rd., Devon, PA 19333, (215) 688-3114.
Color Card lets you do color visuals in your choice of colors and speeds. It displays color graphics on cards and allows a variety of different windows as well. You manipulate the new windows with a new menubar Windows entry.
Here is your FREE Mac upgrade. Pay attention. I guarantee it will work. If you learn all of the keyboard equivalents in the programs you use regularly, and USE them, you will get a speedup that will be bigger than if you purchased an extra meg of memory. Of course you WANT the extra meg, but learning the equivalents is FREE. Use the Mouse Droppings method for learning. Punish yourself whenever you go to the menu for a command with a keyboard equivalent. Refuse to use it there. Return to the keyboard and use the keystroke. It won't take long if you are religious in this practice.
To make selected FullWrite Professional text look like some other block of text, click in the text with the desired format and any currently selected text will assume that format.
Here’s another smoothie for FWP. Let’s say you want a Zapf Dingbats check mark (3) in front of each of several lines. Make one check mark. Select it. Now use Command/Option click wherever you want additional check marks. Keep clicking for more check marks as long as the original check mark remains selected.
A few local Corvallis Mac SE, II and IIx owners with internal 3.5" 40 meg Apple hard drives have experienced problems booting up the hard drive. If the serial number of the drive is between 00335507 and 01023016, Apple will replace it. The serial number is near the 50 pin connector. Tell ‘em Mouse Droppings sent you! If you have already paid money to fix this, scream and ask how to apply for reimbursement. (Thanks, MacWeek.)
Let’s repeat this hint for clarity: To expand or distort type in PageMaker, put the text into a separate text block. Select the block with the pointer tool (not the text tool). Copy. Paste to the Scrapbook. Go to the File menu in PageMaker. Select Place and get the Scrapbook. Open it. Your Place tool will now hold all the pages of the Scrapbook.
Click pages until your text shows. Delete the rest of the pages. Now you can shrink or stretch the text vertically or horizontally, or both.
SmartScrap makes this job easier, since you can establish a new Scrapbook just for this job. Then when you use the Place command, you only have to fool with a single image.
DeskPaint comes with three DAs—DeskPaint and DeskPaint 2 and 3. There is a good reason. You open 2 or three of them and you can cut, copy and paste between them.
This gives me an idea. Rename a copy of PageMaker and zip back and forth in MultiFinder.
No, I haven’t tried it, but it sounds neat! If it works, it will take a bunch of RAM. Any brave people out there want to try it?
Here’s a batch of QuicKey hints for you:
• There is a hierarchy of keystroke procedures with program-specific keys at the top of the list, followed by Universal keys and finally Program keystroke equivalents (not QuicKeys).
• You don’t need to type three periods (...) to define a menu item such as Open... or About...
• If you want to define a click in a program and the QuicKey control panel is hiding the click location, press the Command key and the panel gets out of the way.
• You defined Shift/< and Shift/> as , and . and you actually need a < or a >. Hold down the mouse and type Shift/< or >. This disables QuicKeys while the mouse is down.
• You can define a Text QuicKey containing a Command key. Type Option/C (ç) where you need the Command key.
In recent weeks I have read any number of lists of Word 4.0 books. Not one list included the Cobb Group's Word Companion (4.0 Version). I have sampled four Word 3.0 books, and the Cobb book is far and away the best. This one for 4.0 is just as good. Of course a lot of material is repeated from the 3.0 book—it had to be.
If this doesn't look like a hint, believe me, it is. Don't buy a Microsoft Press book on Word 4.0. Microsoft got its chance when they produced the official manual. They shouldn't have the option of also selling you a $20-30 book to tell you what the manual should have told you.
Why does Microsoft say that it’s own book on MS Works, for example, is needed “to use their product to the fullest,” or “provide(s) many excellent hints not found in the documentation?”
I expect third party books to find unique techniques not found in the manuals. But Microsoft Press (strangely, for that name) is a part of Microsoft, so why should you pay $20-30 more to get documentation which MS left out of its own manuals.
I don’t get it! (The pun was intended.)
Go third party book!
Font Sizer makes many new sizes of LaserWriter fonts. That's neat. The bad part is that it doesn't make small sizes (6 to 9 points especially). It also doesn't tell you how much memory it is going to need to make a font. El Bombo or El Quitto.
If you need larger sizes for a nice screen look, go to it. Font Sizer does it well.
In Word 4.0, try this: Open Spelling... Enter the word ‘childcare.’ Click Suggest. Hey! What is going on here?
Now try this: Type -.1, hit Tab, type -.9. Now highlight them both and hit Command/= to calculate the result. Compare the result to your own math.
Finally, select Screen Test under Commands in the Edit menu. Click ‘Do.’ When you are tired of it, click anywhere. If you have color—WOW! If you like this “screen blanker” assign a keyboard equivalent to it and/or put it in a menu for easy access.
If you had a MACazine subscription when that mag folded, MacWorld should have already extended your MacWorld subscription an equal number of months. Contact them at (800) 525-0643 if you haven’t heard from them on this subject.
Mac ][ owners who want 030 capability can opt for a Dove 030 Marathon board for under $1000 instead of Apple’s $2200 upgrade. There is no caching, so it isn’t quite as fast, but you get plenty of speedup and the 030’s PMMU capability. This will let you run Virtual memory, too.
While you are waiting for the dough for a Marathon board, you might try an Orchid MacSprint II board for $239 mailorder. It will up your Mac][ speed 20% or better.
Then you can wait for the profusion of accelerator boards to hit the market. MacNexus’ (Sacramento CA MUG) Mark Cutler has an Orchid board and has seen no new INIT or cdev conflicts.
Hold down the Shift key while you select Revert in PageMaker 3.0X and you revert to the last mini-Save, and not the last ‘Command/S’ or regular save. You may be able to recover most of a corrupted document this way if PageMaker won’t let you Save or turn pages.It’s worth a try. You may find other uses for this specific type of save.
By the way, version 3.02 will solve this “no page turning” and “document too complex” problems in PageMaker 3.01 and earlier versions.
Sigh! You got a label stuck in your ImageWriter. Try this: Get a playing card (the Queen of Spades works best) and roll it into the ImageWriter just as you would a sheet of paper. Very often the Queen of Spades will push the label on out. By the way, you can also use the Jack of Diamonds or the 2 of Clubs. I have had no luck with Hearts or the King of Spades. (Thanks, Apple Core of Memphis, TN.)
When you are using a lot of special characters (Option and Shift/Option) shrink your page vertically and place KeyCaps below the page on your screen. Now you have constant reference to KeyCaps until you choose to close it.
Do you have trouble making Freehand curved text start and stop where you want it to?
To set centered type in a circle, draw the circle, then ungroup it. Next, set the type, select it and choose Alignment>Centered from the Type menu.
Select both the circle and the type. Choose Special>Join from the Element menu. Notice that the type is perfectly centered over the 3 o’clock position on the circle. That is because Freehand draws a circle from the 9 o’clock position, moving clockwise, so type centered on the 3 o’clock position IS centered as far as Freehand is concerned.
Now, with the circle selected, get the Rotate tool. Hold the Option key and click in the center of the circle. The Rotate dialog box will appear. Enter 90 degrees of rotation, click Center of Selection and OK.
To rotate the text along the bottom of the circle, clone the above image in the Edit menu. Select the Mirror Image tool, Option click, choose Horizontal and Center of Selection and then OK. Now choose Element Info from the Element menu. Click Edit Text to change the wording as you choose. (Thanks, Ken Weeks, (714) 750-2112.)
A new HyperCard stack, Lightning Labels ($24.95) collects addresses from text files or data bases and prints out labels on the LaserWriter. One beauty of this stack is that it lets you use all 33 labels on 33-label stock. Hurray! MacStax+s, 1142 Indian School Rd., Phoenix, AZ 85013, (415) 530-1971.
For people wanting to print on all 33 labels of a label sheet, also consider Silicon Press and FastLabel. Each will do that. However, Silicon Press seems to get sorted zip codes out of order on every sheet of labels. That is not satisfactory for many jobs.
FastLabel does everything right. But you have to be mildly interested in a $25 stack which does the same thing.
To let more programs import your Illustrator masterpiece, copy it to the Clipboard with the Option key held down.
Some PageMaker users may like this one. Name your styles preceded by a number for easier locating.
Like 1Headline, 2Subhead, 3Byline, 4BodyText, etc.
To recover a damaged HyperCard stack:
• Get a copy of the Delete ResXCMD. First make a list of all XCMDs and all other resources in the stack. Delete the resource fork of a COPY of the damaged stack. Open the copy. Avoid messages about missing XCMDs. Save a copy of this copy. Reinstall the XCMDs.
• Another way is to use Apple’s Recover stack.
The Word Finder DA packaged with Word 4.0 is designed to only work with 4.0. If you have a ‘real’ WordFinder DA, replace the one Microsoft sent you.
Someone (I forget who) suggested the following as a nice looking visual to accompany a “next card” command:
visual iris close to black
visual scroll up slow
I tried it and didn’t find it all that fascinating. But it did serve to remind that you can lump together a whole batch of visuals in your “next” or “previous” button scripts. I have visual scripts for “next” buttons with up to seven visuals in operation.
Try all kinds of combinations. Arm yourself first with a list of all the available visual commands, like fast, slow, checkerboard, iris, dissolve, etc. Now have at it and combine all sorts of visual scripts.
In most programs you can keep a DA, like Scrapbook, open all the time. To do this, open the DA and haul it down to the lower right corner of the screen. Now click on the program window behind the DA. Drag its window up from the bottom of the screen just a sliver, so you can see a bit of the DA.
Now you can click back an d forth between the program and the DA easily.
HyperCard has a problem with this, so use an FKEY, DA or QuicKey which lets you rotate windows.
If your Mac scrolls too fast (you 512 and Plus people are now going w-h-h-h-a-a-t?) there are INITs out which will slow it down. One is ScrollSpeed55. Ain’t that a blast? The Mac is now “too fast.”
So that you PageMaker owners will shut up and stop whining for a spell checker (last thing I want to burden that 900k program with), there now is Thunder II 1.01. It works with PageMaker.
If I wanted something else in PageMaker, it would be a tool to let me rotate text in one degree increments.
Meanwhile, ReadySetGo slogs along, burdened by its built-in spell checker.
Do you remember to use the Tab key to navigate dialog boxes? The Tab key moves you from item to item. No need to use the mouse. Try it, please.
When you open a new document in PageMaker, if you aren’t sure exactly how many pages it will be, make more, not less, than needed. It’s easier to delete than to go back and make new pages.
In any event, you might want to make one extra page to use as a “scratch” page to try things out.
Don’t split PageMaker documents larger than 128 pages (200, for instance) into 128 and 72 page sections. Split the pages more equally, so that you have a little elbow room in both parts. If you have 128 pages in a document, PageMaker won't let you add a page. That could be a problem.
Facing pages in PageMaker take longer to redraw. If this is a pain in the tutu, don’t use facing pages unless you have to.
Don’t Cut and Paste material in PageMaker from one page to another. Drag a copy to the pasteboard area. Go to your target page. Grab the material from the pasteboard. It’s faster.
There are a lot of ways to move from page to page in PageMaker. Here’s a neat one:
Hold down the Shift key and select Go to Page__ from the menu (not with Command/G). This gives you a slide show of your document. Click the mouse to stop on any page.
Or, Command/Tab moves you forward one page. Command/Shift/Tab moves you back a page. Hold those keys down and pages keep changing. You can use this method when you have the scroll bars hidden, denying access to the page number icons.
If you hate screen redraws in PageMaker, set the greeking in Preferences to a higher number and more text will be greeked. This results in faster screen redraws. The default is 6 points.
One way to look up Mac information on CompuServe is to type GO COMPLIB and search all Ziff Davis computer magazine keywords. That includes MacUser.
I have told you that typesetters use one space after an end of sentence punctuation mark. Here is one good reason. The computer distributes any loose space at the end of a justified line two times. That’s once for each of the two spaces typists place at the end of a sentence. This makes for loose, hard to read copy. Use just one space.
Remember how to make sure this is done right before you get comfortable with doing it automatically? Use the Change item and type two spaces in the top box. Tab and type one space in the change to what box. Let ‘er rip. All your two space mistakes will get changed to a single space. Easy!
I had to do that for about six months before my old typing habits were completely forgotten.
Are you using quotes correctly? Periods and commas belong inside the ending quote mark. No exceptions. Colons, semi-colons, question marks and exclamation marks go inside only when they are a part of the quoted material—not a part of the entire sentence instead.
TIFF images which have been imported into PageMaker must accompany the PageMaker file when you print. The penalty for not having it present is a 72 dpi image instead of a 300 dpi image.
The Price is Right!
ReadySetGo does not provide for templates, as PageMaker does so easily. But not to worry, Whit, you can have them anyway. There, there now!
Just set your defaults in an RSG document and give it a template name. To use it, open the template document, Save As... and go to work. Does that help you poor left-out RSG users, Whit? And Whit, RSG hates most menu clocks, so wear your Dan Quayle wrist watch while you Mac away in RSG.
To rule a form in PageMaker with lots of horizontal lines which do not necessarily extend full page width, rule full width lines instead and cover the lines with paper shade, no line rectangular boxes to space the lines accurately.
Here’s another PageMaker forms idea: To space horizontal lines correctly, determine the vertical distance between lines in points. Now set the leading manually in the Text menu item to that number of points. In Preferences, under the Edit menu, set the Vertical Ruler-Custom to the same leading figure.
Grab the ruler zero point and haul it to the baseline of the first line on the form. Choose Ruler Lock in the Options menu. Now line you draw will snap to the right increments down the page. (Thanks, Personal Publishing, August 1989.)
Styles in PageMaker aren’t just for fonts, styles, sizes and tabs. You can use a style to denote a specific amount of vertical space to separate paragraphs or blocks of text. Just type a hard space in the “space” style to hold the line in that style.
By the time you get this, I should be trying out a new way to label disks. Remember the white “blackboards” which use felt tip markers? Well, someone came up with a paper which has that whiteboard quality. You can write on them with Sanford Sharpie pens. Erase them with a special eraser, or use alcohol for a complete redo. Call 1-800-541-4351 for a free sample. I’ll report on these labels as soon as they arrive.
Do you need a word processor, graphics program and desktop publishing program? How about Nisus 1.01. It has more bells and whistles than most Mac programs out there. A lot of nice surprises, too.
I ought to repeat this one every month. Having two or more Systems on your hard disk is punishable by death—of your hard drive.
You trashed a file. Oh, oh! You shouldn’t have. No problem, open the trash and drag it back onto the disk.
But you say you EMPTIED THE TRASH! Although you could use SUM utilities, if you had previously installed XTreeMac and its Revive-A-File INIT, you can recover that deleted file. You can’t install Revive-A-File after the trashing. It has to be there before you goof. $90 retail, XTree Co., 4300 Santa Fe Rd., San Luis Obispo, CA 93041. Be sure you get at least version 1.2, since 1.0 is full of bugs.
Apple maintains a list of stolen Macs. If you know someone who experienced a theft, tell them to phone it in. By the way, with a strong pair of scissors, you can cut Apple’s security cable, so beware. (Thanks, MacValley Voice, Burbank CA MUG.)
WriteNow 2.0 will let you move an entire paragraph one tab stop right or left. See Indent Left/Right to Tab in the Format menu.
To save space on disk with WriteNow 2.0, hold down the Option key while saving. This deletes WriteNow’s auxiliary backup copy.
To quickly copy a format in WriteNow 2.0, click in the paragraph with the desired format and Copy Ruler. Now select the paragraph(s) to receive this format and Paste Ruler.
If you put a document called Stationery in the WriteNow 2.0 folder, WriteNow will always open an untitled copy of the Stationery document. If you don’t want stationery, hold down the Option key while opening WriteNow.
I sometimes receive disks arriving in a plain business envelope with no cushioning. About one out of five has a bent shutter.
Today I got a disk from Jack Carr, a CMUG member in San Antonio, Texas. He taped a piece of bubble pack over the shutter. A piece 2-1/2 by 4-1/2 inches will cover the shutter and the round metal piece on the back of the disk. Hold it in place with a couple of pieces of Scotch tape. It arrived in fine condition! Think I’ll try it!
If you have a subscription problem with MacGuide, call Ben Templin, Editor in Chief, directly at 1-800-877-9100. He’ll get it fixed for you, since he doesn’t want MacGuide to get a bad name.
If you got a copy of Apple’s Desktop Media kit disks, watch out! Some of them may have the nVIR virus. If you have the two disk set, lock both disks and check them out with Disinfectant, Virex, or some other capable virus detection program.
Do your Apple Talk connectors ever come loose causing you to spend a lot of time locating the unplugged connector? Some companies are SuperGlue-ing the connectors together. Of course when you change your setup, you have to purchase new connectors, but meanwhile—no loose connectors.
This is a hint, not a rumor: An Ehman 20 meg. external hard drive costs less than the retail price of an Apple 800k floppy drive. Think about it.
Here’s your $200 hint for the day. Do not try to put a disk with a bent shutter into your Mac. The $200 part is when you swap out your damaged floppy drive for a new one.
If you do have a disk hang up in a drive, do not pull on the disk to make it come out. A trip to the Apple dealer to get it out will cost a lot less than a new drive. (Thanks, MacPacker, from The Mac Pack, Richardson, TX .)
Due to good buys on Sony disks, some CMUG disk prices are down for a change. See page 2 for the good news. Order now and order a lot and save bucks.
TSI in Eugene can take your 128 or 512 Mac to 2 megs and run it 25% faster than a IIcx with a board that costs less than $2000. The board also has a PMMU chip (that‘s $500 right there).
Honest reviews! Yes, there are some. You will find them in MacGuide, which gives a product zero if they deserve it.
I’m not saying I agree with all of their reviews, because I do not, but MacGuide is the only magazine out there with real guts about downgrading bad Macintosh software.
Remember, the buying guide issues of MacGuide contain every address and every phone number for every Macintosh-oriented company, including MUG of Corvallis and your editor.
Reward them with a subscription: Mac Guide, 550 S Wadsworth, Suite 500, Lakewood, CO 80226, $27.
Do people pirate software from your hard disk while your Mac is unattended? Here’s how to stop it.
Use any Finder replacement (On Cue is best, and Oasis and Power Station also work). Place all your vulnerable applications in a single folder. Tell your Finder replacement where they are (that means install them in the Finder replacement’s menu).
Next, use Disktop, select Preferences and check Technical. Choose your folder full of applications, click Get Info and check Invisible.
Now you can access all of your programs through your Finder replacement, but only knowledgeable hackers can copy your applications to their own disks. (Thanks, MacGuide, for parts of the above tip.)
If you use DiskFit to back up to 1.44 megabyte disks, you should UNcheck Auto Format, or every disk will be formatted 800k. The manual does not explain this correctly.
High density (1.44 meg) diskettes are reasonably priced at the OSU Bookstore.
