Inside Mac OS X 10.7 Lion: TextEdit adds vertical layout, graphical toolbar
Mac OS X's bare bones text editor gets some attention in the coming release of Lion, adding support for vertical layouts for East Asian languages, as well as a graphical menu bar with font selection and text highlighting.
TextEdit demonstrates Apple's new automatic file saving and versions technologies in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, which replaces the app's simple autosave feature (previously set to save a backup copy every 30 seconds).
Along with the new document saving model, the humble TextEdit leaps all the way from its current version 1.6 to Lion's 1.7 by replacing its text-heavy, non-standard toolbar with a similarly non-standard (and non-configurable) one that at least presents paragraph style, line spacing, and list options graphically.
The new toolbar also adds font face, weight and size controls, color well controls for both text color and text highlighting, and bold/italic/underline buttons.
For users typing in a language that supports vertical text layout, such as Chinese, Japanese, or Korean, a new option enables vertical text layout. While Roman characters are simply printed sideways in vertical layouts, certain East Asian scripts print their ideograms in a stack vertically, which is supported in Mac OS X's underlying Core Text API and exposed for use in Lion's new TextEdit.
Note that when the app is put into vertical text layout, Roman characters are printed sideways while the Japanese glyphs are stacked vertically on top of each other (below).
TextEdit demonstrates Apple's new automatic file saving and versions technologies in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, which replaces the app's simple autosave feature (previously set to save a backup copy every 30 seconds).
Along with the new document saving model, the humble TextEdit leaps all the way from its current version 1.6 to Lion's 1.7 by replacing its text-heavy, non-standard toolbar with a similarly non-standard (and non-configurable) one that at least presents paragraph style, line spacing, and list options graphically.
The new toolbar also adds font face, weight and size controls, color well controls for both text color and text highlighting, and bold/italic/underline buttons.
For users typing in a language that supports vertical text layout, such as Chinese, Japanese, or Korean, a new option enables vertical text layout. While Roman characters are simply printed sideways in vertical layouts, certain East Asian scripts print their ideograms in a stack vertically, which is supported in Mac OS X's underlying Core Text API and exposed for use in Lion's new TextEdit.
Note that when the app is put into vertical text layout, Roman characters are printed sideways while the Japanese glyphs are stacked vertically on top of each other (below).
Comments
Cool.
This should make TextEdit more than suitable for many users needs. That means no need to install pages.
As a side note it looks like 10.7 is getting a lot of tweaks that will benefit the user. Maybe more than in the past.
If this means that Numbers and Pages will finally be able to rotate text in table cells (or at least set it to vertical mode)... then: hooray. Last thing I need Excel for.
Good catch. It makes sense.
BTW, in case you're curious the horizontal and vertical text is Japanese and says 'Kore ga Nihongo desu', or rather 'This is Japanese'
actually they wrote it wrong, it's supposed to say これが日本語です。not これが日本です。
If this means that Numbers and Pages will finally be able to rotate text in table cells (or at least set it to vertical mode)... then: hooray. Last thing I need Excel for.
Seriously I was trying to plot some data from an old O'scope a few weeks ago and found the both Excel and Numbers where to stupid to plot simple data. Installed MacPlot and had the graph I needed within a minute. Oh and it looked really good! So this is a big atta-boy for MacPlot.
In any event I can understand Apples need to have some compatibility with other spreadsheets in Numbers. The problem is Numbers and other spreadsheets are used outside of the financial and business management industries where upon features such as graphing fall flat on their faces. So I'm really hoping Apple sees value in making Numbers a more general purpose calculation and graphing tool.
Good catch. It makes sense.
We can hope but let's be honest we don't really know what Apples plans are for iWork. I'm hoping for a major update / revamping for Numbers myself. It has been a long time so they have had a chance to refactor.
Personally I'd rather see Apple go to a 2-3 year release cycle for iWork apps. Make the major releases worthwhile and significant. One thing I found out with running Linux all those years is that you can release software to fast and thus wear at any good will you may have with the user community. Trying to keep up with releases takes focus off your work and places it on the app. At times that can be very bad.
BTW, in case you're curious the horizontal and vertical text is Japanese and says 'Kore ga Nihongo desu', or rather 'This is Japanese'
Actually, the text used in this article (clearly written by a native English speaker who doesn't fully know Japanese) currently says "Kore ga Nihon desu" (Romaji transliteration). The proper translation of that into English is, "This is Japan" because "日本" is "Japan." If you native English speakers doubt me, examine it yourself here:
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/c...wwwjdic.cgi?1C
Furthermore, when putting two languages together like this, it's only natural to assume that both sentences are the same content, but just in two different languages. Not so in this case. The English speaks about the text layout while the Japanese talks about something else. True, I've only lived in Japan a mere 16 years, but to me, pairing an English & Japanese sentence together even though they each differ in meaning is truly "okashii."
Therefore, one can only hope that when Apple pitches this new TextEdit feature, they will do a better job with the Japanese than AppleInsider! But if Apple really wants to do Japanese right, they'll buy out JustSystems and replace Kotoeri with ATOK. (ATOK allows Kanji entry by sketching characters, even if your stroke order is not correct.)
http://www.atok.com/about/
The one inch mandated margin is my personal peeve.
Perhaps create a 9-page article out of it, explaining 'history of TextEdit', how 'Jobs did it in neXT'?
this is hardly news...
Yes. Maybe because this is not CNN or ESPN.
It is "Apple Insider" --stuff we OS X users read when we want to know about upcoming products/changes/etc.
Running out of news, AI?
Perhaps create a 9-page article out of it, explaining 'history of TextEdit', how 'Jobs did it in neXT'?
1) And you? Lost the ability to SKIP past articles you don't want to read?
2) For the asian language speaking AI audience this info is useful, you anglo-centric-AI-bashing-OSX-using-bigot.
actually they wrote it wrong, it's supposed to say これが日本語です。not これが日本です。
Also, wrong particle. It should be "これは日本語です。? Anyway, I love this feature. Too bad the deadline for my last japanology-paper is coming monday...
1) And you? Lost the ability to SKIP past articles you don't want to read?
2) For the asian language speaking AI audience this info is useful, you anglo-centric-AI-bashing-OSX-using-bigot.
Well said! I know lots of people for whom this is big news, and for me it's "oh that's interesting". Not earth shattering but interesting.