Filed under: Features, How-tos, Tips and tricks, Troubleshooting, Ask TUAW
Ask TUAW: Editing PDFs, Selecting Text, Medical Terms and More
It's Wednesday and that means it's time for Ask TUAW! Our queries from last week included questions about deleting pages from a PDF, triple-clicking to select a sentence, adding medical terms to OS X's spell checking dictionary and more. Remember, we need your questions to keep Ask TUAW going strong! So please feel free to post new questions in the comments of this post, or submit them via our tip form. As always, please add your own comments or responses to our answers. And now to this week's answers...
Brandie asks
Is there a free and good application that I can use to delete pages from PDF files? I don't really need to do anything in the PDFs except delete.
If you're really stuck on free then your best bet is probably the donationware PDFLab (above, just uncheck a page to remove it) or Combine PDF. Neither of these applications is exactly pretty, but they will probably get simple jobs done. If you were willing to spend some money, then you would probably find PDFpen ($50) more pleasant to use (e.g. drag and drop reordering, etc.).
Jon asks
One thing that has been driving me crazy in Mac OS X lately is that whenever i triple-click a word it selects the whole paragraph instead of that sentence. Any chance you could help me with this?
There seems to be some ambiguity about what the triple-click is supposed to do in OS X. Apparently the triple-click to select a single line only works in certain, generally older applications (e.g. AppleWorks). In most newer applications (e.g. see Apple's own support documents for Pages, iWeb, and Keynote), the behavior you are seeing (i.e. triple-click selects an entire paragraph) is normal. If you only want to select a single sentence, the best way is probably to use the shift-select trick. Position the cursor at the start of the sentence, then hold down the shift key and click again at the end of the sentence. Unfortunately, given that Apple itself seems to be deprecating the triple-click = select sentence functionality, I'm afraid you're probably going to have to get used to doing without it. If any readers know otherwise, please share in the comments.
Aaron asks
I am a medical student, and I was wondering if there is a way to find and add a medical dictionary so anatomical and physiological terms are not flagged as incorrect by spell check.
So far as I can tell there is no regularly available plug-in medical dictionary that will add medical terminology to OS X's built-in dictionary. I did find the Inductel Medical Dictionary ($60), but it seems to be meant for use with Word, and since you indicated elsewhere that you were using Pages it is unlikely that it would work with it. Your best bet would probably be to use Spell Catcher X ($40), which has built-in support for a 24,000+ word medical dictionary. Some reviews on MacUpdate seem to indicate that its medical dictionary is quite helpful.
Josh asks
How can i get the desktop to default to the left hand side rather than the right? To clarify, i mean for instance how the HD icon on the desktop, or any files or documents that i save to the desktop are always found on the right hand side of the screen, but i would like them on the other side... how do i change this? its has been bugging me for a long long time! Cheers
As you can see above, having the icons on the right is the way it has worked on the Mac since the start. To my knowledge (and research) there is no way to change this behavior other than some ridiculous tweaks like filling your entire desktop with transparent icons (further, this is not a good idea given how OS X uses memory for desktop objects). Unfortunately, since this is one of those Mac vs. Windows things (i.e. Windows has the behavior you describe), I doubt you're going to find many Mac folks who will be very sympathetic with your plight.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Ahmad said 9:29AM on 2-21-2007
weird. I was reading the triple click question and I decided to try the shift click to see how it works. I held down shift and I did a little double click and all of the sudden.... the whole paragraph disappeared! I kept doing it and eventually the whole page was blank.
how odd.... I never that could happen
http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b336/zikman/shiftdblclick.png
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Mark Studdock said 9:43AM on 2-21-2007
If you install texexec you can play around with pdf's some. It is free and has a nice interface. (well I like it) I frequently use it to combine multiple pdf's as such:
texexec --pdfarrange --paper=letter --result combined.pdf *.pdf
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Richard Cooley said 9:59AM on 2-21-2007
When filling out forms a single letter or number will pull down a list of words or numbers used in that box before. For some boxes the list of alternatives is quite long. How can I edit this list?
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jonas said 10:37AM on 2-21-2007
Cool, I didn't know the shift-select trick even works in non-edit contexts (like Safari, NNW). Just click somewhere, hold Shift and click somewhere else, and everything in between is selected. Awesome.
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macgrrl said 10:58AM on 2-21-2007
There's also PDFClerk from SintraWorks which has some of the features of PDFPen and then some more. Check out: http://www.sintraworks.com/
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ArcTG said 11:34AM on 2-21-2007
For sentence selection you can double-click the first word and then very easily shift-click anywhere on the last word to select the sentence and avoid having to be precise.
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Daiya said 12:48PM on 2-21-2007
I'm sure PDFPen does more than the free programs, but CombinePDF has drag and drop re-ordering, also.
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fatgolfer said 12:56PM on 2-21-2007
What I have done to get medical words non-flagged in Word (can't imagine why this wouldn't work in Pages) is to copy/paste online versions of the Merck Manual into a .doc file and then just go through and start right clicking and "Add" the word to your spell check dictionary. It may take you a couple of hours but the word 'free' comes to mind when I justified the time spent.
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Aron Trimble said 3:01PM on 2-21-2007
I would like to ask TUAW a question. It is not about my Mac, iPod, or OS X... but it's a question I would like TUAW to answer nonetheless!
When I am on my Mac in Safari or Firefox and I wish to comment at this fair site need only to enter my e-mail and password. However, on my PC at work I still am required to activate my comments via e-mail.
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josh said 2:56PM on 2-21-2007
Ok thanks for answering my question re: icons on the desktop. just to follow up, i only want the icons on the left as i like to have the dock on the right, and when mousing over the dock, the names of the docked apps gets mangled up and unreadable with the names of the desktop icons below.
I tried turning off the mousing over name-thing using a setting in transparent dock, changing the icon font size to 0, but it had unwanted side effects in expose, removing the ability to get the names of minimized windows... I would settle for no icons on the desktop at all, if only that were feasible.
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Kevin Ashworth said 5:28PM on 2-21-2007
My question is how to combine separate PDFs into one. Should be easy as pie, but it ain't. For efficient two-sided printing, I've needed this a few times recently and cannot figure it out.
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Hippo said 8:34PM on 2-21-2007
Sentence selection (Jon & #6 ArcTG): double-click the first word, but don't release the mouse button, then move the mouse, it will expand and shrink the selection by entire words. Move to last word. Release mouse button. Very fast and convenient, especially with tapping enabled on the trackpad (you have to move immediately after the second tap).
Related: once the text is selected, click on it without releasing the mouse button, and keep the mouse still for a moment. You can now drag-and-drop the text around, including into other applications.
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starwxrwx said 8:37PM on 2-21-2007
To get your icons on the left, you could turn off auto-arrange (CMD-J then unselect Keep Arrange By...)
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Mark said 8:51PM on 2-21-2007
But you CAN remove everything from the Desktop...??
Remove all the files from the ~/Desktop folder, for starters. Then go into Finder preferences, and remove the checks next to "Show These Items on the Desktop". Empty Desktop, voila!
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Wollie said 1:48AM on 2-22-2007
RE: Kevin Ashworth... to combine PDFs I use CombinePDF (http://www.monkeybreadsoftware.de) and I use another app called CocoaBooklet (http://www.iconus.ch/fabien/cocoabooklet/) to make booklets.
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jeff said 9:28AM on 2-22-2007
is there any way to save those Flash movie things? I hate to download them everytime... on a dial-up takes forever
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Peter said 11:09AM on 2-23-2007
About selection: CTRL+Left or CTRL+Right does it for me, but that's keyboard-based.
About PDFs: There are a lot of great tools built with iText (a PDF library). Try Google.
Saving flash movies: Try keepvid.com ... vlc will play those flash movies just fine.
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Jon Stieglitz said 6:24PM on 4-05-2007
My startup used to go very quickly but lately it's slowed down. At first I thought it was because of shapeshifter, so I deleted it. The startup time continues to get longer. I've heard of resetting RAM and other things like that. Would any of them help my startup time?
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Jacob said 5:24PM on 4-26-2007
I have a question for next week:
Is there a way to set a hot corner to open up an application? I ideally want to be able to set the bottom left corner of my 23" ACD to activate the "Sleep Display" app, so that it will just put the display to sleep......I've googled a little, but can't seem to find an answer......Hopefully, TUAW can come to the rescue!
Thanks!
Jacob
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