Fractions on a Mac

Mild grouse...

In writing it is preferable express fractions, such as "one half" rather than use special symbols. Fractional brevity is poor writing style.

The exception to this is in technical writing, in which fractional amounts are preferred to be decimal fractions, such as 0.5 ( always with the leading zero to the left of the decimal point ).

Just my $0.02.

Symbolic fractions are still taught just as the archaic ( and almost unused outside the U.S.A. ) "English" ( not even used in the U.K. ) systems of weight and measure.

Technical writing uses decimal fractions rather than symbolic fractions. All symbolic fractions can be expressed with reasonable precision using decimal equivalents.

I am new to mac and I wanted to know how to make fractions on a mac.

You really need to specify what app you are using. But in general, do Edit > Special Characters to get the Character Palette, then View = Roman, Tab = By Category, Digits, bottom row of the table: ½ ⅓ ⅔ ¼ ¾

well, it was no app in particular. When typing in windows I could be using anything and using the combination above produces the fraction.

Some apps will have their own special characters palette in place of Apple's, and most word processors will have a feature where you just type 1/2 and get ½. In Pages, for example, this is found in Preferences > Auto-correction.

It is a Monday morning, so why not post to a thread of less than earth shaking importance? ;^)

Symbolic fractions are useful precisely because they are symbolic. People understand at a very intinctual level concepts such as "one in three" (1/3) far better than they understand 0.333333 (repeating). I leave it to the reader to decide how "reasonable" the precision of repeating numbers is.

Open your preferences panel (assuming you're using Mac OS X.n.

Look for the INTERNATIONAL preference and click on it.

Just below the menu bar, click on Input Menu. Then click on Character Palette AND Keyboard Viewer in the window. Finally, click on the "Show input menu in menu bar" box at the bottom of the page.

Close the preferences pane.

Now, look for a US Flag icon in the upper right corner of your Finder menu bar. Mine is just before the current date/time.

Click on the US flag and select "Show Character Palette" from the pull-down menu.

In the subsequent pane, select "All Characters" in the "View" pull-down (if not the default). Then click on "Numbers and Number Symbols" in the "Symbols" drop-down menu.

Scroll down in the character pane on the right and you'll see the fractions that are built into the Mac OS fonts. If you single click on one of them then click on the insert button (at the bottom of the window) Mac OS will insert that fraction into whatever document you're working on.

Fractions include 1/2, 1/3, 2/3, 1/4, 3/4, 1/5, 2/5, 3/5, 4/5, 1/6, 5/6, 1/8, 3/8/, 5/8, 7/8, and 1/ . Use the 1/ coupled with the numbers on the next line in the window to make your own 1/ fraction.

By the way, use the other menu choice in the US flag pull-down (Show Keyboard Viewer) to see all of the characters available for each font on your mac. Be sure to look at the characters available by holding down each of the Mac's control and function keys (and sometimes combinations such as control-option). There are tons of characters built into Mac fonts that are only available through this method.

Apple has many Math applications at their download site. You may have them in special characters under Edit.

Ray

Your very welcome, thank you for the ☆, you will find what you seek.


Have a great day,

Ray in NY.

Such is so true according to Diana Hacker, Rules for Writers fifth ed. My English professor would admire proper use of Mathematical symbols when writing. Just my one penny.



Ray

"... Pi is EXACTLY three ..."

Thanks so much for the comments on Pages -- just what I was looking for.

Trillium