convert 1/2 to stacked professional fraction automatically without going through equation editor each time

Seems like using control+= and then typing 1/5 followed by the space bar and a click would automatically format the professional (simple) stacked fraction you seek in the current (e.g. v16.99.1) Word. I see no other way unless you can adapt previous fractions to Word's AutoText on the Insert menu.

You won't be able to do this with Apple's Emoji and Symbols panel as you get as far as 1 then a combining low line (u+0332), but there is no combining numerical denominator to finish the simple fraction stack.

You mean like this: ½ ⅕ ⅛ ?

It's done in System ➙ Text replacement ➙ Keyboard ➙ Keyboard Shortcuts:

The fractions are from this menu:

and the All Digits section:

petefrompoughkeepsie wrote:

I need to convert pages of these fractions from one style to the other and not take 4 steps per fraction

This is not possible. Any word processing app like Word or Pages is going to represent an equation as a special kind of object. You can copy and paste individual objects, but you can't use them in any of the text replacement operations because they aren't text.

One solution would be to convert the entire document into LaTeX and then replace those fractions with the LaTex codes, because all of it would then be text. But then you'll be stuck in whatever LaTeX editor you have. There are tools to convert the entire document to Word, but if you have any other fancy formatting, you stand an excellent chance of losing all of that.

create text replacements for those fractions. You can use the symbol emoji viewer to get the replacement characters.

Replace text and punctuation in documents on Mac - Apple Support (IE)

Use emoji and symbols on Mac - Apple Support (MK)

petefrompoughkeepsie wrote:

Thank you for your prompt reply

I want to be able to actually not just switch symbols but actually the input as well...

so the 1/2 actually displays as 1 over 2...it works the opposite way so that one over 2 display as 1/2

I don’t understand.

so unless I am not understanding you correctly I still need a solution...I need to convert pages of these fractions from one style to the other and not take 4 steps per fraction

Text replacements work on entry, not as find and replace which is what I would use if they are already entered as 1/2 (When I type that I get ½ because I have the text replacements set to do that).

If that’s what you mean in your first paragraph, and the text is already entered somewhere, then you’ll have to use fine and replace to change all the entries.

I even found a couple of Mac Word VBA scripts that promise to convert all simple n/m fraction styles to n stacked m in the entire document. They do transform n/m to an intermediate EQ \f(n,m) for each fraction occurrence in Word v16.99.1, but do not update the document with the visually stacked results as advertised.