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