Technical information

Page 7
By Trevor Drover
Since version 10.6 (Snow Leopard) Mac OS X provides support for
system wide “Text and Symbol substitution” that can be configured in the
“Language & Text” system preference pane. This method allows you to
setup the text input system to automatically replace any thing you can
type on the keyboard with a longer string or symbols, or in this case,
fractions such as 3/8 with ⅜, or 1/2 with ½, whenever the text 3/8
or1/2 (then a space or punctuation) is typed in some applications.
I demonstrated this feature at a recent meeting and some members
asked me to provide more details, so here they are.
To configure this text substitution open the “Language & Text” pref-
erence pane in system preferences and navigate to the “Text” tab. Just
put a tick against the fractions you want to be substituted.
The text replacement will become active only after your applications
have been restarted. A limitation of this approach is that it works only in
applications that have been built using the OS X Cocoa libraries. While
this will cover the vast majority of the applications you are likely to use,
there is one notable exception: Microsoft Office for Mac does its own
thing hence this form of text substitution will not be available. Fortunately
there i⅕⅕s an easy workaround, which I will describe later.
In Pages you have to specifically enable the fractions you require in
the Auto-Correction Preference tab. You can add extra fractions in the
same way as you do for the “Language & Text” preference pane.
Some applications, such as iChat, iPhoto, Mail, Safari, and TextEdit,
can be configured to automatically replace your text with the desired
format.
To turn on text substitution features in the above applications:
A. Control-click and choose Substitutions > Show Substitutions. (In some
applications, you can also choose Edit > Substitutions > Show Sub-
stitutions.)
B. In the Substitutions window, select the text substitution features you
want to turn on.
Adding Your Own Text Substitutions
Still in the “Lan-
guage & Text” system
preference pane select
“Input Sources” and
make sure you turn on
the “Keyboard & Charac-
ter Viewer”. This puts an
icon the same as below
on your topmost menu-
bar. If you have more
than one language se-
lected to switch between,
then you will see the flag
for the language you are
using instead of the icon.
If you go back to the
Text tab and select the “+” plus button in the bottom left hand corner
Enabling Fraction Substitu-
tions