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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).

Mac OS X Lion TextEdit
Mac OS X Lion TextEdit

33 Comments

dreyfus2 18 Years · 1069 comments

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.

wizard69 22 Years · 13358 comments

Quote:
Originally Posted by SpamSandwich

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.

jamesjpn 16 Years · 31 comments

BTW, in case you're curious the horizontal and vertical text is Japanese and says 'Kore ga Nihongo desu', or rather 'This is Japanese'

mdriftmeyer 21 Years · 7395 comments

Quote:
Originally Posted by dreyfus2

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.