Spell Check with All Caps Not Working

Pages assumes ALL CAPs indicates an acronym and ignores it.

The way around this is to type the all caps in upper and lower case or all lower case and format it as ALL CAPS:

+Menu > Format > Font > Capitalization > All Caps+

Peter

There's also no mention of this in the Pages '09 User Guide, which I'd go to before the Pages Help files.

Looks like a design choice to assume that anything that is ALL CAPS is to be treated as an acronym.

Your choices seem to be:

1. Don't use all caps, except for acronyms, and check closely that you make no typos in acronyms.
2. Use lower case for acronyms so that the spell checker will flag them. Replace with ALL CAPS when you do a final spell check. (Acronyms that form properly spelled words will need an extra character added to cause the spell checker to flag them.
3. Copy the text you want to check and paste it into an application that will flag acronyms. For word processors, this seems to require one that uses its own dictionary rather than the Mac OS X dictionary.*
4. Do your writing/editing in a word processor fitting the description in #3. Transfer the text to Pages only for formatting (or not at all).

Regards,
Barry

* One such 'application' is the Compose frame in this forum, running on Firefox (I haven't checked it on Safari).

PS: With luck, someone will have a more workable suggestion than the ones above.

PPS: Addition of the option to check or ignore ALL CAPS words in spell checking seems a natural for a feature enhancement request. Got to the "Pages" menu in Pages, choose Provide Pages Feedback, make the request, then be prepared to wait until at least the next full version of iWork to see any results.
B.

EDIT: See, my PS was correct. Peter's suggestion is simpler than some of mine.
B

Message was edited by: Barry

This just demonstrates what I have long said here.

The programmers consistently demonstrate an odd lack of user experience and common sense.

The string of bad decisions here are:

1. Won't spell check ALL CAPS because that was too hard.

2. No option to turn on or off the ability to spell check ALL CAPS if that is what the user wants

3. The lack of user control on such matters applies to many other such problems in iWork

4. No built in means to actually convert text from lower case to ALL CAPS and vice versa

5. Which makes it extremely awkward to resolve the only practical means to fix the problem in point 1

Peter

I should also have added that there is no keyboard shortcut for switching All Caps on and off.

The accepted normal set is +command shift k.+

Which raises issues with other shortcuts. Quite a few of which confuse users, like the odd inclusion/exclusion of shift for up down sizing of text.

Peter

The accepted normal set is command shift k.

"accepted"?
"normal"?

I don't have an extensive set of applications on this iBook, but of the ones I checked, none used shift-command-k to toggle all caps. Some had Change Case as a top level menu choice with a sub menu listing choices of what type of change to make. Others had Change case itself in a submenu.

This one (Safari) uses that combination to toggle Block pop-up windows. Most just produced a 'wrong key' plunk from the speakers.

Regards,
Barry

Word, Quark XPress, Indesign, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Premiere, After Effects, in fact almost any Adobe product that deals with Text… obviously not Safari which is a browser and an Apple product, therefore consistently inconsistent even with other Apple software.

I probably could find others but they're a good start.

Peter

PeterBreis0807 wrote:
Word, Quark XPress, Indesign, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Premiere, After Effects, in fact almost any Adobe product that deals with Text… obviously not Safari which is a browser and an Apple product, therefore consistently inconsistent even with other Apple software.

So, in fact, ONE editor use the described shortcut.

As far as I know, neither Adobe nor Microsoft are the tables of law.

The day the shortcut will be define by IEEE, I will accept the fact that it's the 'normal' one.
At this time, it's just one among many other ones.

I wish to add that, my practice is different than the one described by the OP.

Here, the spell checker flag correctly the typos.



For the lines in English, the checker is set to English.
For the others, it's set to French.

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) mardi 22 mars 2011 11:26:12

Where do you get ONE from Yvan?

Those are three widely used software publishers. They have also been in use for as long as I can remember which is a very long time and not challenged by comparison with software which have virtually no established keyboard shortcuts.

The shortcuts are substantially mnemonic forming a sensible, regular and memorable pattern covering most eventualities.

Better a sensible and regular practice than none at all.

As usual I am struck more by the lack of experience of some users here than anything else. Which yet again demonstrates how the most useful features on the Mac have been degraded due to the dumbing down of the interface and the under-utilisation of those features by users who are struggling with even elementary tasks.

Peter

PeterBreis0807 wrote:
Where do you get ONE from Yvan?

Those are three widely used software publishers.

oops, I took care of Adobe products and missed Word and Quark Xpress. A psycho-analyst would probably explain that it's because I dislike these two products 😉

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) mardi 22 mars 2011 18:23:19

A psycho-analyst would have a wonderful Viennese word for that too.

Freudian unmagenvergessenheit, derived from your mother cutting short your breast feeding because of her bradykinesia hampered word processing making her late on her assignments?

If only she had known a few basic memorable keyboard shortcuts! 🙂

Peter

My mother never put a finger on a keyboard 😉

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) mardi 22 mars 2011 19:00:51

Not even a piano? 🙂

Peter

PeterBreis0807 wrote:
Not even a piano? 🙂

As far as I know, NO.

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) mardi 22 mars 2011 19:11:56