Some of the trickiest editing and proofreading problems are related to characters you can’t typically see on the screen: spaces, tabs, and returns. Just because they’re invisible doesn’t mean they don’t affect the look of a document, often in negative ways. For instance:

• An extra space can cause an awkward jump from one word to the next, or it could push punctuation away from the final word in a clause or sentence. And yes, current convention among professional publishers and typographers calls for one space after a period, not two.
• The wrong number of tabs might not be obvious until you add or remove text from the line, at which point having too many or too few tabs will suddenly mess up the formatting.
• An extra return causes a line break, something that you might overlook if the return falls naturally where the line would break on its own, but as you add or remove text, the line break could become embarrassing.

These and similar errors are easy to make or to encounter in copied and pasted text. They’re equally easy to fix, but only if you know why they’re happening. To help you identify them, most Mac word processors, page layout programs, and text editors have a command or option called something like “Show Invisibles.”

As you would expect from the name, Show Invisibles replaces previously invisible characters with something you can see. Spaces are generally replaced with a vertically centered dot, tabs with some sort of right-pointing arrow, and returns with something that’s formally known as a pilcrow but more commonly called a paragraph mark. Here’s what they look like in Pages.

Revealing invisible characters is tremendously helpful, but it can also clutter up the display and make text harder to read. So every app that lets you show invisibles also makes it easy to hide them again so you can focus on your text.

Note that even if you can see invisible characters on the screen, they will not show in a printout of the document.

Precisely where you find the Show Invisibles command—and what it’s called—varies from app to app. Here’s where to look in some popular Mac word processing, page layout, and text editing apps:

• Pages: In Apple’s Pages, you can reveal invisible characters by choosing View > Show Invisibles. To hide them, choose View > Hide Invisibles—the command changes based on whether or not they’re showing.
• Microsoft Word: In Microsoft’s near-ubiquitous word processor, the primary way you show and hide invisibles is by clicking the ¶ button in the Home toolbar. Click it once to show and again to hide. However, if you always want certain invisible characters to appear, you can select them individually in Word > Preferences > View > Show Non-Printing Characters.
  
  
• Nisus Writer Pro: In this highly capable, long-standing alternative to Microsoft Word, choose View > Show Invisibles. When selected, it gains a checkmark. Choose it again to conceal the characters and remove the checkmark.
• Scrivener: In this word processor aimed at long-form writing and screenwriting, choose View > Text Editing > Show Invisibles. Choose it again to hide them.
• Adobe InDesign: In Adobe’s market-leading page-layout app, choose Type > Show Hidden Characters. The command changes when selected. Hide them again by choosing Type > Hide Hidden Characters.
• Affinity Publisher: In this inexpensive but surprisingly full-featured competitor to InDesign, the command you’re looking for is Text > Show Special Characters. When you choose this command, it gains a checkmark. Choose it again to hide invisible characters and remove the checkmark.
• BBEdit: This text-editing powerhouse aimed at developers, bloggers, and Web designers lets you show tabs and returns, spaces, or both. Either choose the Show Invisibles and Show Spaces commands in View > Text Display or click the tiny gear icon in the upper left of the window and select the appropriate checkboxes.
  

Not all text-focused apps offer a way of displaying these invisible characters. For instance, we know of no way of doing this in Apple’s TextEdit. Nor is it possible in the online word processor Google Docs, although you can achieve a similar effect temporarily by choosing Edit > Find and Replace, selecting Match Using Regular Expressions, and then searching (one at a time) for a space, for \t for tabs, and for \n for returns.

Even if you’re using an app not mentioned above, our descriptions of their approaches should give a sense of what to look for in the interface or the app’s documentation. Enjoy your newfound ability to see beyond the visible!

(Featured image by Aleksandar Pasaric from Pexels)

In macOS 11 Big Sur, Apple went back to a design direction from the earliest days of Mac OS X: a translucent menu bar. Since its color changes depending on the desktop picture, many people aren’t enamored of it (left, below). Luckily, reverting to the traditional opaque menu bar is simple. Open System Preferences > Accessibility > Display and select Reduce Transparency. That will turn the menu bar gray again and make other windows and menus opaque, too (right, below). Simple gray might not be as whizzy as fancy transparency, but it’s more predictable and easier to see.

(Featured image by aung nyi on Unsplash)

Along with the now-ubiquitous videoconferencing, screen sharing and online presentations have become vastly more common during the pandemic. This isn’t yet another article about how to give a better presentation or feel more confident. (Although those might happen too.) The goal of this article is to help you avoid situations that could embarrass you in front of clients, colleagues, or bosses. Follow this advice and you could avoid an unfortunate happenstance that might even cause you to be fired.

Here’s the problem. Even more so than before the pandemic, our Macs feel like personal spaces. Just as you’d add a houseplant and a special photo to your desk at work, you’ve probably personalized your Mac in a variety of ways. Custom desktop wallpaper, for instance, or a screensaver that displays favorite photos. Plus, you may carry on personal conversations, possibly even intimate ones, if you catch our drift, using the same Mac that you use for communicating with those aforementioned clients, colleagues, and bosses.

We’re not here to admonish you or nag about inappropriate behavior. (Though we will encourage you to consider some sage advice from a friend’s mother, who noted drily that you should never put anything on the Internet that you don’t want to appear on the front page of the New York Times. And that was before Twitter.)

No, as we said, the goal here is to help you avoid the embarrassment caused by people who are viewing your screen seeing things they shouldn’t see, something that the New York Times has also covered. Some areas of concern include:

• Desktop & Screen Saver: Jobs have been lost by inappropriate selections for desktop wallpaper and photo screen savers. Make sure, if you’re ever going to share your screen, that randomly chosen desktop pictures and folders of screen saver photos don’t contain anything that could be problematic. To be safe, choose an Apple-provided desktop picture and a pattern-based screen saver in System Preferences > Desktop & Screen Saver.
  
• Icons on the Desktop: We all toss files on the desktop, but if preview icons or even filenames could cause trouble—you might not want your boss seeing Resumé.doc—corral them in another folder before you share your screen. Also note that many videoconferencing apps can limit their screen sharing to particular windows rather than the entire screen, which prevents people from seeing your desktop.
• Web browser tabs: Limiting screen sharing to a particular window won’t help if it’s a Web browser window with multiple tabs. Even if you avoid accidentally navigating to a tab with NSFW content, its title alone might be problematic. For safety, always start a new browser window when sharing Web content.
• Open apps and documents: As with icons on the desktop when sharing your entire screen, you may not want just anyone seeing what other apps and documents you have open. Again, stick to sharing a specific window. To avoid mistakes when selecting the window to share, we recommend hiding or quitting all unrelated apps before sharing your screen.
• Document comments: When collaborating on a document, some people are less than politic with their in-document comments. If comments are visible when you’re sharing a document with people who wouldn’t otherwise see them, hard feelings could ensue. Make sure to hide or resolve such comments before sharing.
• Notifications: Even if you have hidden or quit Calendar, Messages, Mail, and similar apps, their notifications could still appear at an inopportune time. You might not want colleagues to know about an ob-gyn appointment, meeting with a potential employer, or racy conversations with a coworker. The solution is Do Not Disturb, easily enabled from Control Center in macOS 11 Big Sur and by scrolling up in Today view in Notification Center in earlier versions of macOS. Also, although it won’t help with online screen sharing, it’s a good idea to enable the “When mirroring to TVs and projectors” option in System Preferences > Notifications > Do Not Disturb.
  

One final piece of advice. When you’ve accomplished what you need to by sharing your screen, stop sharing it and switch back to video. That way, you can’t accidentally do something in the shared window that might be embarrassing. Similarly, when a meeting is over or you’re dropping off for a while, it’s best to leave the call. Stopping video and muting audio are good tools, but it’s easy to click in the wrong spot accidentally and think you’re safe when, in fact, your mic or camera is still live.

(Featured image by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels)

Sadly, email is not an entirely reliable communications medium, thanks to spam filters, addressing errors, and server failures. With certain types of email, it’s worth double-checking that a message was seen. One example of that we see is with reports of phishing email, which miscreants use to try to trick you into revealing passwords, credit card info, or other sensitive information. Phishing messages can be tricky to identify—that’s their goal. If you’re forwarding a possible phishing email to us or another trusted technical contact for evaluation, remember that spam filters often catch such messages, so they may go unseen. To work around this awkwardness, send a separate message saying you’ve forwarded what you think might be a phishing message so the recipient knows to check their Junk mailbox if need be. It’s helpful if you can include the Subject line of the suspect message.

(Featured image by Mikhail Nilov from Pexels)

Given their integration into the Mac’s Finder, it can be easy to forget that online file sharing services like Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive can be accessed using a Web browser by anyone with your username and password. Obviously, you should always have strong, unique passwords, but to be safe, it’s best to also turn on 2 step or 2 factor authentication for these services.

Since the earliest days of the iPhone, Apple’s Safari and Mail have been the default Web and email apps for iOS and, later, iPadOS. There was no way to choose alternatives that would be used whenever an app wanted to open a Web page or create an email message. That has now changed with iOS 14 and iPadOS 14. To switch to a different Web browser (such as Brave, DuckDuckGo Privacy Browser, Firefox, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, or Opera Touch) or a different email app (such as Boomerang, Chuck, Hey, Gmail, Outlook, Polymail, or Spark), follow these directions. In Settings, tap the name of the browser or email app you want to set as the default. Then tap Default Browser App or Default Mail App and select the desired app.

(Featured image based on an original by Sotiris Gkolias from Pexels)

For those who cook, the Apple Watch provides a helpful Timer app that ensures we don’t forget whatever’s in the oven until it’s burnt to a crisp. Setting the timer is easy from the app’s interface, but even easier is using Siri: just hold the Digital Crown and say, “Set a timer for 8 minutes.” When the timer goes off, the watch makes a sound or vibrates and presents you with Stop and Repeat buttons. But often, when a timer goes off, you’re wearing oven mitts or moving quickly, making it hard to look at the watch and tap the Stop button. There’s a no-look alternative you may not have known about—just press the Digital Crown once (if the display is active) or twice (if the display is dimmed) to stop the timer.

(Featured image by Adam Engst)

Last quarter, Apple’s Services segment generated a whopping $15.8 billion in revenue, 14% of the company’s total—sales of apps, media, and subscriptions are a big deal to Apple. And if you’re like us, you’re probably now paying Apple for services like Apple Music, extra storage for iCloud Photos, various app purchases and subscriptions, and perhaps the new Apple Fitness+.

It’s a lot to keep track of, but particularly with subscriptions, it’s essential to stay on top of the charges and make sure you’re paying only for services you’re still using. Happily, Apple enables you to do that on both the Mac and the iPhone/iPad.

Review Your Purchase History

On a Mac running macOS 11 Big Sur or 10.15 Catalina, you can see your purchase history in the Music app. If you’re running an earlier version of macOS, you’ll use iTunes instead. In either app, choose Account > View My Account. Scroll down to Purchase History and click See All at the right.

In Purchase History, you’ll see every one of your purchases from Apple, whether it’s an app from the App Store, a book from Apple Books, or a subscription like Apple TV+ (even when it’s free). You can click the More link to the right of any purchase for a few additional details (in the screenshot below, these are showing for iCloud) or click the blue Order ID link for even more details. Also hidden inside the Order ID information for any item you paid for is a Resend link that sends you another email copy of the invoice for that purchase.

On an iPhone or iPad, navigate to Settings > Your Name > Media & Purchases > View Account > Purchase History (you’ll need to scroll down for the last one). The Purchase History screen shows the same information as on the Mac, and you can tap the Total Billed line under each item for the equivalent of the Order ID details, complete with a button for resending the email invoice.

Apart from merely displaying your purchases, the Purchase History screen can raise two other questions:

• Why isn’t an item I purchased showing up? The main reason why this happens is if the purchase was made with a different Apple ID. If you have two or more Apple IDs, that could explain it, or if you’re participating in Family Sharing, a family member might have made the purchase. In either case, you must sign in with the appropriate Apple ID to see the purchase.
• What are these purchases that I don’t recognize? The most likely explanation is that someone in your Family Sharing group made a purchase without telling you. You can turn on Ask to Buy if you have children in your family. If you’ve shared your Apple ID and password with someone else (never do that!) who has bought items without your knowledge, we recommend changing your Apple ID password immediately. If you still can’t figure it out, contact Apple Support.

Manage Subscriptions

For the most part, app, book, and other purchases aren’t that expensive, but subscription fees can add up quickly. We recommend checking your subscriptions periodically to make sure they’re all still relevant and canceling any that aren’t. Here’s how.

On the Mac, you can manage your subscriptions in the Music app in Big Sur or Catalina, though Apple recommends the App Store app. In the App Store app, click your name or picture in the lower-left corner and then click View Information at the upper right. In the window that appears, scroll down to Manage and click the Manage link to the right of Subscriptions.

Next, you’re shown a list of all your active and expired subscriptions.

To see more details about a subscription, click Edit to the right of the subscription’s listing. You can now change your billing period using the radio buttons and cancel the subscription by clicking Cancel Subscription.

On an iPhone or iPad, it’s a little more straightforward. Tap Settings > Your Name > Subscriptions to see a list of all your subscriptions. Tap one of them to change the billing frequency or cancel it.

Although it’s easier to manage subscriptions on a Mac, iPhone, or iPad, you can also cancel subscriptions from the Apple Watch or Apple TV. Here’s what to do:

• On the Apple Watch, open the App Store app, scroll to Account and tap it, tap Subscriptions, tap the desired subscription, and tap Cancel Subscription.
• On the Apple TV, you can see subscriptions only for installed tvOS apps, and thus only for the Apple TV HD and Apple TV 4K. (For the third-generation Apple TV, use a Mac, iPhone, or iPad to manage subscriptions.) Open Settings, select Users & Accounts, select your account, select Subscriptions, choose the desired subscription, and select Cancel Subscription.

Finally, what if you don’t see the subscription you want to cancel? There are a few possibilities:

• You can’t cancel iCloud storage plans or AppleCare plans in this way. Apple provides separate instructions for downgrading or canceling iCloud storage plans and for canceling AppleCare plans.
• If a family member signed up for the subscription, you can’t cancel it. Ask them to do so using their device.
• Not all app subscriptions are billed through Apple. You’ll need to cancel outside subscriptions through the original vendor.
• As with missing purchases, if you signed up for the subscription using a different Apple ID, you’ll need to switch to that Apple ID to cancel.

We hope this article has shed some light on purchases and subscriptions you make through various Apple online stores.

(Featured image by Tim Gouw on Unsplash)

For the most part, Spotlight works well. Press Command-Space or use the Search field in a Finder window, and it finds everything that matches your search term. Sometimes, however, Spotlight fails to turn up a file that you know is present, likely due to index corruption. To fix the problem, you can force Spotlight to rebuild its index. (Don’t do this unless it’s necessary since reindexing can take a long time and may impact the performance of your Mac while it’s happening.) Open System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy, and then drag your drive (or the drive on which Spotlight isn’t finding files) into the list of locations that Spotlight shouldn’t search. That deletes the old Spotlight index. Still working in the Spotlight Privacy list, select the drive and click the – button below the list. Spotlight now reindexes the contents of the drive and should find your files properly in the future.

(Featured image by cottonbro from Pexels)

For you graphic designers out there, Adobe has announced that it will be ending support for PostScript Type 1 fonts starting with Photoshop in 2021. All Adobe apps will stop allowing users to author content using Type 1 fonts beginning January 2023.

This announcement shouldn’t come as a surprise. Adobe introduced Type 1 fonts at the dawn of the Macintosh age back in 1984, started collaborating with Microsoft on the more versatile OpenType fonts in 1996, and stopped developing Type 1 fonts in 1999. Although some operating systems still support Type 1 fonts, Web browsers and mobile operating systems don’t. Worse, Type 1 fonts don’t support Unicode, limiting their ability to support extended language character sets.

However, Mac users whose careers stretch back to the 1990s and earlier likely still have Type 1 fonts kicking around—who would toss a Type 1 font that worked perfectly well? Now’s the time to think about dealing with those ancient fonts.

First, however, it’s worth a quick trip to Font Book (or whatever font utility you use) to determine which of your fonts are Type 1 fonts. You can do this easily in Font Book by creating a smart collection that selects fonts by kind:

1. Launch Font Book from your Applications folder.
2. Choose File > New Smart Collection to open the Smart Collection dialog.
3. Give the collection a name, like “PostScript Type 1.”
4. Choose All from the first pop-up menu.
5. From the criteria pop-up menu, choose Kind and complete the search by choosing “is” from the second menu and PostScript from the third menu.
6. Click OK to save your smart collection.

Once you have a sense of which of your fonts will be impacted by this change, you have three options. You can just delete them and move on, replace them with modern OpenType fonts, or convert them to OpenType.

Delete Type 1 Fonts

Although it would seem like Font Book should let you delete fonts directly, when you Control-click a font, the Remove command may be dimmed out. If that’s the case, choose Show in Finder instead.

That opens a new Finder window with the font files selected. In all likelihood, there will be other font support files in there as well, so make sure you don’t need to keep anything before tossing it all in the trash.

If you’re more cautious, don’t trash those files immediately. Instead, temporarily sequester them in a special folder. This is just in case any old documents or older software on your Mac is using those font files. As you go about your weekly and monthly tasks, if you encounter a problem with a missing font, you may wish to reinstall that font until you can find a different solution.

Replace Type 1 Fonts

For a Type 1 font published by Adobe Type, the company says you can contact its partner Fontspring to receive a discount when upgrading the font to an OpenType version. For other Type 1 fonts, including those sold by Adobe, Adobe recommends contacting the font foundry to see if there’s a discounted upgrade path.

That may be easier said than done, given how old many of these are likely to be. However, you can start by looking at the font metadata to see who created the font or holds its trademark. Select a font in Font Book and click the i button in the toolbar. The Trademark metadata is a good place to look, and some fonts may have Manufacturer, Designer, or Copyright metadata that might provide contact information.

Convert Type 1 Fonts to OpenType

Finally, what should you do if you rely on specific Type 1 fonts and no OpenType versions are available? It might be possible to convert your fonts from Type 1 to OpenType. Although we haven’t tried it, Mike Rankin at CreativePro recommends TransType, which costs $97. It’s not cheap, but it may be your only alternative.

It’s impressive that PostScript Type 1 fonts have retained support for nearly 40 years—those who bought in early got an amazing run for their money. But it’s not unreasonable for Adobe and other tech companies to move on to OpenType, which is still going strong after 25 years, with its most recent update so far in November 2020.

(Featured image by Mr Cup / Fabien Barral on Unsplash)