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OSX and bad eyes
TextEdit
Apple's "Free" Word Processor May Be All You Need
OSX and bad eyes
From Philip
Dear Charles:
I always enjoy your helpful columns, and we've occasionally corresponded over the years, where your answers have helped me a lot. But my problem is now I'm no longer a young man! I find that increasingly, with aging eyesight, the newest LCD displays on Macs are just "too small" to read comfortably at their default pixel size. They are optimal, apparently, for watching movies and wide-screen displays, rather than for editing and academic work, which my wife and I do. I've recently looked at some of my old Macs (I have tons of them, going back to Mac Plus) and I still find them easier to read than my new ones).
Now the old OS9 (and earlier) had a feature to change system fonts. That was great. But in OSX, so far, I don't see it. Is it implemented somewhere? For me, the "obvious" alternatives have serious flaws:
1. In individual programs one can make the fonts larger...but that doesn't help in dialog boxes, menus, and all the minor things that count for comfortable computing.
2. One can change the screen resolution. No! LCD screens are made to work best at their "natural" settings and I find they are fuzzy at anything other than that. I am writing this on a 15" Intel MacBook Pro 2.2 GHz, matte LED display, running OSX 10.4.11. Crystal clear, sharp, but menus, etc are *too small* for my comfort level. And I don't like the changed resolutions' looks.
3. Recently my wife got a nice 20" iMac (late model previous generation Intel Core2Duo) with the very good screen (not the current alu iMac 20" with its shiny TFT screen--she really disliked that!). My wife is a Windows person and was excited to get a Mac. Guess what: she hates it! Not the programs or the design, but the small native fonts. She's an editor, and her old Windows XP machine and screen fonts are specially set-up for her business, and she wants to be able to duplicate that set-up on the Mac. No, it seems it can't be done.
Is there any way to implement the old Apple feature of changing the system's screen fonts (both style and size) ? Again, we appreciate your helpful comments. Many thanks in advance.
Phil
Hello Phil
Thank you for the kind words about my columns.
Yes; your MacBook Pro has the same screen resolution as my older-model 17" PowerBook, which I find just the good side of borderline for my eyes, which are also not getting younger. I can imagine than legibility crosses to the other side of the border on your two inch smaller display.
Happily, you don't have to settle for Apple's default system font size (16). The fix isn't exactly simple, but it's not too bad. You can find a good tutorial here:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20080402181745803
There's also a long and interesting discussion about system fonts in OS X here:
http://www.atpm.com/12.01/paradigm.shtml
Hope this proves a satisfactory workaround to your problem. Let me know how it works out.
Charles
TextEdit
From Brettcamp
Thanks for the tips on some of Leopard’s TextEdit improvements; I haven’t had a chance to check out what’s new since I just upgraded to Leopard. But I’ve long thought that TextEdit, since Panther or so, is all the word processing most casual users need, and I wish Apple would advertise it as part of OSX. I bet some new users don’t even know it’s there and therefore think they have to buy Word, Office or iWork/Pages. I’ve been a professional writer for 20 years and have often been able to get by with TextEdit—in part because of its very simplicity, which doesn’t get in the way of writing. Can’t say that about Word! I never print anymore—just send work to editors—so the layout functions of Word and Pages are useless to me.
As for preserving formatting, you can sometimes overcome that problem by using Preview’s new annotation and comment features, and use Apple’s built in pdf functions to exchange docs in pdf form. Preview is another hidden gem that Apple should advertise more.
Of course TextEdit does lack basic page layout features, footnotes, comments, change-tracking etc., but I bet most users can often get by without them. I do wish it would just adopt all the features of the old AppleWorks word processor, and maybe basic outlining. (Didn’t AppleWorks have basic outlining? Can’t remember anymore.)
The biggest missing element for me is live word count, and to get that and a few other missing features, I’ve started using the free word processor Bean, which adds just a few important tweaks to Apple’s text system. Everyone who thinks TextEdit isn’t enough should try Bean, and then NeoOffice, before buying a word processor.
TextEdit, and apple’s entire text system, does get complaints on the Scrivener forum for various deficiencies that I hope Apple will fix in the next update.
Howdy;
I've been a full time professional writer since 1986 (and a dabbler for some 15 years before that). I think it was sometime in the late '80s when I submitted my last hard copy article or column ms. to an editor.
I can't recall whether AppleWorks had an outliner either. I was never a big ClarisWorks/AppleWorks user. I started with MS Word 4 on my first Mac, and soon upgraded to Word 5.1, which was a great word processor. I bought and used MacWrite Pro fora while, but wasn't smitten, and AppleWorks' WP module was a lot like MacWrite Pro. I eventually switched to Nisus Writer for a time, but when it finally dawned on me that I really didn't need much in the way of document formatting, since I was submitting virtually everything as plain text or html via email, I started using Tex Edit Plus as my do-all, general purpose text crunching app., and quickly became addicted to its superb integration with AppleScript. It's still my main axe, but I also use TextEdit and when I need a pure plain text editor, TextWrangler.
Charles
Apple's "Free" Word Processor May Be All You Need
From kiwiiano
You must be using a different version of TextEdit from the one that came with my copy of Leopard, Charles. Mine [v1.4(220)] lacks many of the features you're waxing about.
I've also been using Bean (which I believe is based on TextEdit) for its added features like margin controls, invisibles and word count. It's even replaced AppleWorks for most of my needs.
To stop TextEdit leaping into action when I wanted something opened in Bean, I had zipped it and dumped the original. That may have stopped it being updated.
Hi;
The version I'm using is 1.5 (244), but to the best of my knowledge there have been no features added since OS 10.5 was released.
Which ones seem to be missing in your copy?
Bean is a nice little application. I haven't used it for a while, but by happenstance I had downloaded the latest version just before I checked this message.
You can specify your preferred application to open particular document types by default using the Open With menu in the Get Info dialog (Command > I).
Charles
***
Charles W. Moore
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