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Unlike previous versions of OS X, Snow Leopard uses one application to open all files with a given extension. LaunchCodes lets you open files in the application that created them. Old creator code behavior or new extension behavior LaunchCodes gives you the best of both.
Highlights include:
- Designed exclusively for Mac OS X
- Uses PDF as its file format; anyone can read your documents perfectly, fonts and all
- Places all controls outside the text area; no dialog boxes or inspectors cover up your work
- Categorizes your fonts for you, so you dont have to scroll through a long list every time you select a font
- Was designed from the beginning to use styles in a simple, intuitive way
- Never forces you to choose from a bewildering array of small icons
- Helps you with typography, whether you are making fractions, using a special character, or looking for a nice ornament
Features
Pagehand can do most of the things you expect a word processor to do:
- Columns and Margins
- Tables
- Sections
- Page numbers, in various formats
- Updating date field
- Spell checking
- Templates (we call them Document Styles)
- Headers and footers
- Document properties (author, subject, etc., plus custom properties)
- Word count
- Automatic updating with new versions
- Autosave
- Automatic text replacement
- Styles
- Find and Replace
- Smart Quotes
- Smart Insert and Delete
- Speech support
- Page and column breaks
- Adjustable hyphenation
- Layout guides
- Show Invisibles
- Magnification (or scaling, zoom in and out)
- View one or two pages at a time
- Scale to full page
- Scale to page width
- Split view, horizontal or vertical
- Adjust color of text, background, underline, and strikethrough
- Small caps
- Ligatures
- Superscript and subscript, full size or small
- Text shadow
- US or metric measurements
- Adjustable baseline and kerning
- Adjust paragraph space before, space after, leading, line height
- Widow and orphan support (we call it Prevent Stragglers)
- Keep Together and Keep With Next
- Tab leaders
- Bullets and numbering
- In addition, Pagehand has some features that most word processors lack:
- A document format (PDF) that everyone can read
- Automatic grouping of your fonts into categories
- Support for Apple font collections
- Print guides
- In-app feedback (and we do read our feedback)
- Choice of tabbed or untabbed windows
- Ruler shading to indicate how indents affect paragraph shape
- An editor for your Apple spelling dictionary
- An editor for the document-level spelling dictionary
- Smart Quotes can be turned on or off at the character level or in a style
- Direct menu support for over 60 special characters
- A viewer for ornament characters found on your Mac
- An editor for creating typographically correct fractions
- An efficient user interface that avoids reliance on icons
- A superbly easy-to-use Styles editor
- A handy button to set the default font for a document
- Adjustment of character weight, width, and obliqueness
- Help pages that include tips on using your Leopard fonts
- Of course, Pagehand is brand new, and the 1.0 version does not provide all the features we would like to offer. As future versions appear, we hope to add:
- Footnotes
- Text boxes and more versatile text flow around graphics
- Resizing and editing of graphics
- Applescript support
- Plugins, for supporting indexing, table of contents, etc.
- Localizations for other languages
- Advanced typographic support
Yes. Pagehand does an excellent job of translating simple RTF documents, such as those produced by TextEdit. It can translate documents in .doc, .docx, .odt, .odt, .sxw, .stw, .html, and .webarchive formats, too. But lets be honest. The more complex the document, the poorer the translation. Pagehand uses Apples basic document translation system, the same that TextEdit uses. Some other applications, such as Pages and Nisus, have more powerful translators. Document translation is an important area that we hope to upgrade.
Pagehand saves your documents in PDF format. The PDF file includes data that Pagehand uses when it opens the document. If a PDF file was not created by Pagehand, then it lacks the information that Pagehand needs.
Converting a regular read-only PDF file to an editable format entails some data loss. We think that the amount of data loss is too great to make the conversion practical. This conclusion might change in the future as technologies improve.
Applications such as Preview and Acrobat not only ignore the special Pagehand data, they destroy it. When you edit a Pagehand PDF in Preview or Acrobat, the resulting file is very different from the original. You are not editing the file in any normal sense of the word; you are creating an entirely new document that bears only a superficial resemblance to the original.
To summarize: a Pagehand PDF can be edited in Pagehand, and only in Pagehand. A regular PDF cannot be edited.
The PDF file format is one good reason. Another is the Pagehand user interface. Pagehand differs from other word processors in important ways. We believe that when you are writing, your mind is focused on words. Thats why we use text labels instead of icons on nearly all our controls. We dont obscure your writing with dialog boxes and inspector panels. The controls that you use in normal work appear either in the sidebar or the toolbar, both of which intelligently change to as needed.
Because Pagehand is so easy to use, we expect that you will routinely use features such as styles that you could never figure out in other word processors. You will also work with ornaments, accented characters, proper fractions, and attractive fonts because Pagehand helps you in those areas, too.
Pagehand does not yet support footnotes, text boxes, flowing text around objects, bordered paragraphs.
http://support.apple.com/kb/DL955
Pagehand already has the features many people need. But there are more on the way.
System Requirements:
Pagehand requires OS X 10.5 or later.
Price: $39.95
For more information, visit:
http://pagehand.com/
Tags: Software Updates ď Software News ď Writing/Publishing ď
