Making Placeholder Text Visible?

Question

Level 1

6 points

Making Placeholder Text Visible?

hello --

is there a way to show all the text blocks that are marked as placeholder text? once they are selected they have the obvious orange background, but by default it is impossible to see what needs to be edited. it appears to be a flaw that one can't seem to be able to jump from one placeholder to the other already, but at least seeing them would already be helpful.

But may be this is another feature that was never implemented in this version of pages. *sigh*

thanks in advance.

patrick.

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MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X Yosemite (10.10.3)

Posted on Jul 15, 2015 7:19 PM

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Answer 1

VikingOSX

Level 10

123,428 points

Jul 16, 2015 4:55 AM in response to Patrick J

It is no flaw that one cannot tab from one placeholder text to another, as they are not traditional form fields, and have no inherent tab order.

Have you considered this format for placeholder text: [placeholder]. The brackets make it abundantly clear where the placeholder text is located in your document, and when replaced, the brackets disappear. Bracket style is your choice.

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Answer 2

Patrick J Author

Level 1

6 points

Jul 16, 2015 9:25 AM in response to PeterBreis0807

hi peter --

unfortunately that doesn't seem to work or do anything new. when i select a text placeholder it gets highlighted in orange. but there is no simple way of scanning the document and see where the other placeholders are.

thanks,

patrick.

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Answer 3

Patrick J Author

Level 1

6 points

Jul 16, 2015 9:26 AM in response to VikingOSX

hi viking --

this is pretty much the method i have been using, by adding @@text before the editable areas. however, what i am looking for is a way to scan the document and visually see the placeholders. as mentioned, when selected they are quite visible, but i can't figure out how to make them always visible for the whole document.

thanks,

patrick.

===

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Answer 4

VikingOSX

Level 10

123,428 points

Jul 16, 2015 10:00 AM in response to Patrick J

There is no user configurable setting to make the placeholder text always visible. It is extra text characters as we have discussed, or nothing.

I say nothing, because although you could set the placeholder text or its background color to other than black, these characteristics are inherited by the replacement text, and you would then have to make an additional undo operation.

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Answer 5

Jul 15, 2015 8:23 PM in response to Patrick J

Menu > View > Show Layout/Invisibles

Peter

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