dates and ordinal numbers

Would superscript work. You would have to do it manually. If you do not have the icon for it in the toolbar, right-click on the toolbar, select "Customize Toolbar..." and drag the Superscript icon to your toolbar.

If I understand well, the Auto Correction feature available in the preferences pane may be your friend .

Searching for superscript which is what you are asking for, we get:

+Automatically Substituting Text+

+Pages can be set to recognize and replace text you don’t want with text you do want. For example, when you type “teh,” Pages can automatically change it to “the.”+
+To set up automatic text substitution:+

+Choose Pages > Preferences.+
+Click Auto-Correction and make settings as desired.+
+To automatically convert single and double quotation marks to smart quotes so that opening and closing quotation marks are not identical, select “Use smart quotes.”+

+To make sure that the first word in a sentence begins with a capital letter, select “Fix capitalization.”+

+To automatically convert the letters in “1st,” “2nd,” “3rd,“ and so on into superscripts, select “Superscript numerical suffixes.”+

+To set Pages to automatically detect that something you’ve typed is an email address or a URL, select “Automatically detect email and web addresses.” Email and web addresses you type automatically become hyperlinks for Mail or Safari.+

+To use automatic list generation, select “Automatically detect lists.”+

+To replace one or more characters with one or more different characters, select “Symbol and text substitution.” Then use the rows in the table to define and activate specific substitutions. For example, when you type (c), you can have Pages automatically convert it to © by putting a checkmark in the On column. To add a row to the table to define your own substitution, click the Add ➕ button. To remove a selected item, click the Delete (–) button.+

Alas, some users don't like that I repeat that _the Help and the PDF User Guide are our best friends as far as we remember that they are also for us_ .

Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE mardi 21 octobre 2008 18:38:23)

It was useless to know the link with auto-correction.

It was sufficient to search for "superscript"

Doing that returns four entries.
The 2nd one gives the wanted response.

Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE vendredi 24 octobre 2008 17:36:33)