How can I nudge an object by one pixel

Use:

+Inspector > Metrics+

or zoom in.

Peter

How can I get finer adjustment ie 1 pixel?

The measurement inspector works with device independent units. The inspector has one set of measurement controls for the object size, another set of measurement controls for the position of the object in the x-y geometry of the media box that was defined in the page setup, and a third measurement control for the rotation of the object.

Pixels are device-dependent measurement units that cannot be used until the devices that will do the drawing are known. Each graphic display and each graphic printer will have a different resolution and thus the pixel units will be different.

/hh

Mik,

I was working on a response when HH posted, and I'm saying basically the same thing, but maybe in a different way, so I'll continue...

The base unit for positioning in Pages is the "Point". The Point may not be a universal measure, but if you look it up you should find a general agreement that it is about 1/72 inch. How many pixels that is depends the on zoom level of your window. This is also why you may be puzzled by odd resolution in CM, Pica and Inch measures. They are all rounding to the closest representation of the Point scale value.

Jerry

Jerrold Green1 wrote:
Mik,

They are all rounding to the closest representation of the Point scale value.

In fact, the displayed value is not rounded to the closest, it is truncated (rounded to lower).
Internally it remain the true decimal value.

I was puzzled by that when I built a script to resize automatically formulas built from MathType.

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) vendredi 4 mars 2011 15:57:23

I was unaware the the figures were truncated rather than rounded. Thanks.

Jerry

Yvan

What is the finest value possible?

Whole units of points, or several decimal places of the unit chosen?

Peter

1 point. Try setting a position, width, etc. to anything other than a whole point value and see what happens.

Jerry

The base unit for positioning in Pages is the "Point". The Point may not be a universal measure, but if you look it up you should find a general agreement that it is about 1/72 inch. How many pixels that is depends the on zoom level of your window. This is also why you may be puzzled by odd resolution in CM, Pica and Inch measures. They are all rounding to the closest representation of the Point scale value.

The measurement model in Apple QuickDraw and Adobe PosScript per 1984 and since is the US typewriter point of which there are 72 to the inch. The US typesetter measurement model had 72.27 points to the inch and may still be selected in Adobe Photoshop.

When Apple and Adobe were successful with QuickDraw and PostScript, an ISO process that standised typographic measurement on the metric model had to be scotched. British Standards Institute had already published, but eventually had to withdraw the standard.

In general, this was and is a bad outcome. Instead of having an obscure measurement system in modern imaging, it would have been better with a modern metric system across the board. Andrew Boag, formerly Monotype projects manager, has the details of the development.

/hh

Forgot that the default measurement model in Xerox Interpress was metric. It's possible to convert measurement models in human interfaces, for instance, providing the European Cicero point system instead of the US pica point system, but the base in paginated publishing is the font model and device independent font metrics are expressed in the US measurement model. If the font model had been metric, neither ten year olds nor their teachers would from time to time wonder what the measurements in glyph scaling interfaces in fact imply.

/hh

I made a lot of tests to build the script named above.

Clicking at 1234 when an object is at 1234.56 fails to select it.
So, it's clear that the app make the difference between entire values and decimal ones.

What may fool most of us is that the GUI doesn't allow us to set a decimal value so, every body think that only integer values are accepted.

Just for see, create a new blank document.
Insert a square shape whose width is 100 points.

Apply this huge script :

--

tell application "Pages" to tell document 1 to tell first graphic
 get properties
 set old_width to get width
 set width to 123.678
 set new_width to get width
 set horizontal position to 123.678
 set new_Hpos to get horizontal position
end tell
display dialog "" & old_width & return & new_width & return & new_Hpos
--

The shape's width and the horizontal position will become : 123.678001403809

which clearly show that the point is no less breakable than atoms.

If you go to Inspector > Metrics, you will see 124 which prove that the Metrics tool really round.
I guess that as a result of many operations with erroneous scripts something was weird in my system when I got the result described in my response to Jerrold.

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) samedi 5 mars 2011 13:03:19

Henrik,

Thanks for the explanation.

Jerry