In my chemistry-related documents, this is often a problem. I’d like to complain additionally that, at least to my knowledge, there is no way to insert a non-breaking hyphen into a Pages document. I just checked the keyboard shortcuts listing provided with the documentation, the on-line help, and on Apple’s Pages keyboard shortcuts web page, and there is no mention of dashes/hyphens. Typographical control for Zapfino (TT), on the other hand, looks quite complete. Warren: I agree, it’s a pity we can’t have ligatures in Adobe Garamond Pro. Olivier: There are significant differences in the use of the various dashes between English and French (for example, the em dash is normally used without spaces in English typography, whereas French typography requires spaces before and after), but the bottom-line is that all these characters should be readily available via the keyboard in all languages.Īre there any differences in the use of the hyphen, en dash and em dash between French and English? Non-breaking hyphens are indeed another important feature that’s missing. Of course, the fact that Pages is a word processor/page layout application means that hyphens and dashes are more important than in other applications, but this doesn’t seem to have registered with Apple engineers. I didn’t know mouse clicking was a keyboard shortcut! :)
Select a paragraph Triple-click in the paragraph Warren: Presumably the Pages shortcuts page makes no mention of the dashes/hyphens because Apple is still desperately US-centric and figures that these characters are readily available on the US keyboard and that’s all that counts. Since Word has been the application where I have been using the en dash most often in recent years, I just got used to the shortcut provided by Word and never thought there might be another, more universal one. It probably comes from Microsoft Word having a different (application-specific) shortcut for this. It’s been there right under my nose all that time. To go back to the initial post: it turns out that the Canadian CSA keyboard layout does have the en dash. I guess I am going to have to design a customized keyboard layout… This is ridiculous. On my Canadian CSA layout gives access to the incredibly useful… inverted question mark! Gee whiz, whoever designed this Canadian CSA layout needs to be institutionalized. option-N does indeed work with the US keyboard layout, but not with the Canadian CSA one! (Sorry if I am confused by your terminology).ĭarn it, it’s yet another issue specific to the Canadian CSA keyboard layout (and presumably other international keyboard layouts). I’m using a TrueType font, the Times New Roman that comes with MS Word 2004. Pierre: are you making a distinction between the “n-dash” and the “n-hyphen”? On my system, option- gets a n-hyphen and shift option- gets the m-hyphen. Next Post: Pages: Apple says mouse clicking is a ‘keyboard shortcut’ħ Responses to “Pages: No keyboard shortcut for en dash?” Previous Post: PowerPoint 2004: A bad UI that breaks all records You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. On Tuesday, March 8th, 2005 at 8:43 am and is filed under Microsoft, Pages. The thing is, even version 1.0 of a word processor should have such features. When it comes to keyboard shortcuts and customizability, Pages feels very much like a 1.0 application. Requiring users to grab the mouse to access such fundamental features is senseless. Typing text is one of the primary activities in a word processor / page layout application such as Pages. The only option is the Character Palette. It doesn’t even have a menu command for it. This means that each application needs to provide its own shortcut for it.
(I doubt very much that it’s available in other keyboard layouts, but you never know.) The em dash is readily accessible ( cmd-shift-0 on my Canadian CSA keyboard), but not the en dash. The problem is, of course, that, unlike the em dash, the en dash has never been part of the standard keyboard layouts used in Western countries such as the US, Canada, France, etc. Who wants to have to do multiple mouse clicks in order to obtain a simple character such as the en dash - everytime? I realize that the en dash can be accessed through the Character Palette that’s available system-wide (when it’s made visible in the IM menu), but that’s not a solution. When typing text in Pages, as far as I know, there is no keyboard shortcut for the en dash.