The current release of PageFour has a problem with en and em dashes. Though they can be typed or pasted into a page, they are incorrectly converted to single dashes ( ‘-’ ) the next time the page is opened. The problem lies within an underlying Windows file rather than within PageFour.
Version 1.66 contains a temporary work around for this problem. As it is only a temporary solution, it is not activated in PageFour until the user takes a few manual steps. This feature is not considered part of the official version and does not appear in any of the help files or online documentation.
To switch on the en/em dash converter, carry out the following steps:
- Ensure you are running version 1.66 or later of PageFour. If you are using an earlier version, you should download and install the most recent version form the website. Upgrades are free to all registered users.
- Close PageFour if it is open.
- Locate the PageFour installation folder. This will usually be “C:\Program Files\IMBT\PageFour”, unless you specified otherwise during installation.
- A file called “Xenem.p4″ exists within this folder. Rename it to “enem.p4″, by removing the X at the beginning.
- Reopen PageFour and check the main Notebook | Save as Files menu. A new menu item called “Current Page (en/em dashes)” should have been added to the menu.
The converter works by exporting your page out of PageFour as an RTF file, and converting characters or sets of characters into en or em dashes. By default, these values are: space, followed by 2 plain dashes, followed by another space, which will be changed to an em dash, and: 2 plain dashes, which will be changed to an en dash.
The newly saved file can be opened by another word processor, emailed to a publisher, etc., while the corresponding page within PageFour remains unchanged. The values that are converted into en and em dashes can be changed at any time by editing the enem.p4 file mentioned above. Right click on the file, open it in Notepad or another text editor, and change the two values inside quotes to whatever you wish. You may decide that it better suits you to use a tilde (~) in place of spaces and dashes to type an em dash.