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Showing posts from March, 2011

Blank printouts from Word X on Mac

User was having problems printing from Microsoft Word X on her Mac (latest Snow Leopard). Printing to PDF produced blank PDFs. Printing to the printer resulting in blank pieces of paper. Yet creating a new test document from scratch (just typed a few words into the page) was able to produce a valid PDF. A quick review of the Console log showed the following: 05/03/2011 21:51:07 [0x0-0x17017].com.microsoft.Word[176] WARNING: Font "Arial" with style 1 can't be handled by the imaging system. This document can't be drawn/printed with this font. Turns out there were two copies of Arial on her Mac: one in the central Library folder and one in her personal Library folder. I removed the copy from her personal Library folder, restarted Word, and all was then working fine.

Securing notes across my devices

I wanted a secure way to access and edit text notes on my iOS devices (iPhone and iPad) and also on my 'desktop' devices (Macs and Windows), with the notes synchronised across all of those devices, so that any amendments on one device would show up swiftly on all of the others. I was already using the excellent Dropbox in conjunction with PlainText (on my iOS devices), TextWrangler (Mac), and WordPad (Windows) to work with clear text. Using these tools I can read or edit these text files on any of these devices. I also use Dropbox to sync other document types, including Office/iWork files, but only read access on the iOS devices (although I know there are Dropbox-enabled 'Office' apps available) — but as long as I could edit my text files from my iPhone, the Office files could wait until I got back to my Mac. This setup was so useful to me that I started wanting to put sensitive information in there. Work stuff: Unix commands, reports, IP addresses, usernames, even pa