Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Mountain Lion Edition

TextEdit

TextEdit is a basic word processor—but it’s not nearly as basic as people think it is. You can create real documents with real formatting, using style sheets, colors, automatic numbering and bullets, tables, and customized line spacing. You can even open, edit, and create Microsoft Word documents. If you had to, you could write a children’s book in TextEdit, and it would look pretty decent.

Better yet, TextEdit (Figure 16-29) is now a showcase for Mountain Lion’s iPaddish features, like full-screen mode, Auto Save, and Versions (see Chapter 4). It can also save your files into your iCloud locker, as described on Email.

And TextEdit works with OS X’s long list of built-in text-editing features: smart links, smart quotes, smart dashes, smart copy/paste, abbreviation expansion, auto–typo correction, data detectors, and so on. They’re all described in Chapter 5.

Tip

You can magnify the type size of a TextEdit document just the way you do on an iPhone or an iPad: by pinching or spreading. That is, spread two fingers on your trackpad to enlarge the type, or pinch on the trackpad to shrink it. Best. Tip. Ever.

TextEdit’s Two Personalities

The one confusing aspect of TextEdit is that it’s both a plain text editor (no formatting; globally compatible) and a true word processor (fonts, sizes, styles; compatible with other word processors). Here’s the scheme:

• You can change a plain text document to a formatted one by choosing Format→Make Rich Text. The ruler appears automatically to remind ...