Q: HOW TO SORT TEXT ALPHABETICALLY - pages

I solved MY issues: I had two versions of WordService.service, one outdated, after removing it, all is flawless.

so, the best and simplest solution for sort (ascending/descending) in Pages or any word processor which complies with Cocoa routines is WordService. It also allows a lot of other services.

My apologies again for intruding into your discussion.

So I was right.

You described the behavior of a specific odd configuration as if it was the standard one.

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) samedi 7 janvier 2012

iMac 21”5, i7, 2.8 GHz, 12 Gbytes, 1 Tbytes, mac OS X 10.6.8 and 10.7.2

I wrote:

I was ready to revert to WordService, but I found that it does not seem to work with Lion, says I should reinstall—the service is detected, but not functional.’

I described the behavior, without indeed digging deeper into that behavior. I assume you feel better when humiliating me, but—if indeed so— I take it for granted.

Jerrold Green 1 - thank you for your response!! I spent almost 20 minutes trying to figure out how to sort in Pages. I gave up and "googled" how to sort text and I found this forum. Thanks again!!

Denel,

That's how this is supposed to work.

You can search while those who wrote the answers earlier sleep, or watch a hockey game.

Glad you found your answer. There's an easier way to sort, but it takes some time to set it up. If you dowload, install and activate Devon Wordservice, you will have sorting and many other handy utilities at your disposal.

Jerry

Thanks Jerry!

Is Devon Wordservice an application or is it something that works directly with Pages? I'm totally new to Mac, so please forgive me if my question is silly...

Denel

It's called a... Service!

Each app has its main app menu title, just to the right of the little Apple Logo in the upper left corner of the screen. Under this menu there is always a choice called "Services". Services are add-ons, mostly third party. I avoid third party software for the most part, but this one is free, behaves well and does amazing things. It's a little difficult to get it in the right folder after downloading and a little confusing to get set up. Then you forget about it and have a bunch of extra text functions in most of your apps.

Here's the drill:

Download from:

http://www.devontechnologies.com/products/freeware.html

Move "WordService.service" to Macintosh HD > Library > Services

Go to System Preferences > Hardware > Keyboard Shortcuts > Services and check the box for ones that you want, like here:

Jerry

Brilliant tip Jerry!

Thanks!

Thanks for reactivating this thread, j3.

I had downloaded Devon Word Services some time ago, but hadn't finished the installation. Re-reading the thread brought me to Jerry's clear instructions.

Regards,

Barry

I assume by this time you've found an answer, but for those who wish simply to sort text alphabetically check out http://textmechanic.com/Sort-Text-Lines.html.

Since we're revived this thread, yet again, I'll update if for Pages '13.

Services aren't supported in Pages '13. Nor is Text to Table or Table to Text conversion.

The workflow now would be:

• Select the paragraphs to be sorted and Copy.

• Insert a 1-column Table and set to 1 column, no header row. Probably best to do this in a fresh document to not mess up any formatting in the original working document.

• Select the first table cell and Paste.

• Click the menu triangle over the table column and Sort.

• Select the entire column and Copy.

• Insert a Text Box and Paste and Match Style

• Select and Copy the content of the Text Box.

• Back in the original working document, where the text to be sorted should be still Selected, Paste and Match Style.

Wasn't that fun?

Jerry

Jerry

So you are saying this is simpler AND 64 bit!

;D

Peter

Peter,

Simpler, if not doing all that non-supported stuff would unburden you, I guess.

Jerry

To give you an idea how bad Pages v5 is, consider this.

I created an Apple Service item in Automator. Looks like the following. Can't get much simpler. Works in every text based application except Pages v5, which doesn't even show it as available. Changing selected text to selected rich text made no difference. Sort in this invocation follows the ascii collating sequence. If you want a sort by dictionary order, use sort -d.

From selected text in TextEdit:

Update. If you have a vertical list of items in Pages ’09 v4.3 that you want to sort, the line-endings are carriage-returns, not newlines. I know, they look like paragraph (pilcrow) marks.

If you copy and paste this content into TextEdit, the carriage-returns follow. In Pages v5, these line-endings are newlines. UNIX tools want newlines, and bork when encountering carriage returns without special treatment.