Undo auto-correction for typing particular words into Pages

I'm interested in this, too.

I have a friend with a Polish surname, capitalized of course, which Pages always "helpfully" corrects as "police", lower case.

What's the answer to this puzzle, please.

The only answer is to turn auto-capitalisation off.

Perhaps I should have refrained from . . .

1. Grafting my query to what i deemed was a similar one from K_Gal. My apology! And . . .
2. More clearly specified that not only was the proper name de-capitalized, its letters were also transposed (some) or dropped (some) so that the resulting word was police.

What seems to have happened is that I lost a capital and gained a spelling "correction", neither of which were requeted or desired.

Are you saying that auto-capitalization is a multi-tasked utility, so to speak?

Are you talking about auto capitalisation, Auto correction or automatic spellcheck correction, RHPC?? It sound as you have automatic spellcheck correction on.

Auto capitalisation rules depends on which language spell check is set to. The character i doesn't change to I when I use swedish but it does when I set it to english.

I don't know which "function" I'm complaining about.

I only know that Pages takes a surname (foreign) removes its capitalization and substitutes a totally umnrelated English noun for it.

Hello?

I want to know why and how to stop it without screwing-over the settings I have used uneventfully for years in spelling/proofreading text in Pages.

(K_Gal: This primarily addresses RHPC's issue, but does include some comments regarding yours)
B

RHPC:

Yours is a different issue than that described in the initial post in this thread.

Pages has several auto-correction features, all set in the auto-correction pane of Pages Preferences. The two indicated by the arrows are the significant ones in this thread as started and in your hijack of this thread.

Fix capitalization (blue arrow) applies a format (CAPITAL or UPPER) to the initial letters of 'sentences' and words identified as 'proper nouns' (such as "March") in the spelling dictionary. It performs no action on 'words' that have been typed with initial capitals.

In the examples above, the first two lines were typed with 'Fix capitalization' unchecked. The second pair of lines were typed using exactly the same keystrokes as the first, but with 'Fix capitalization' checked. Note that both occurrences of 'will' are the same in each set.

"Automatically use spell checker suggestions" (red arrow) does precisely what it says: If a 'word' is not found in the spelling dictionary, the spell checker will make a 'best guess' and suggest that as a possible replacement. If the 'Automatically use…" box is checked, then Pages will immediately accept the first suggestion, replacing the 'questionable word' with the spell checkers first ('best') suggestion.

There are at least two solutions to this issue:

Uncheck the box and don't use auto-correction. (works for either of these issues)

Teach the spellchecker the correct spelling of the Polish name. (does not work in the case of march/March, which is part of the base dictionary)

To do this:

• Go Pages (menu) > Preferences... Auto-Correction
• Uncheck the "Automatically use…" box.
• Close Preferences
• Open a new Pages word processing document.
• Type the Polish name.
• Ensure that the spelling and capitalization is correct.
• Right click on the name and choose Learn Spelling.
• Go Pages > Preferences… Auto-Correction
• Recheck the "Automatically use…" box
• Close Preferences.

Done.

Pages (and other applications using the system's spell checker dictionary) will now recognize the spelling of this name and will not 'correct' it.

(K_Gal: Unfortunately, when I tried this on "march" the contextual menu did not include the Learn Spelling option 😟 , probably because the dictionary already 'knew' how to spell "March". I'd suggest using the Provide Pages Feedback item in the Pages message to report this to apple, and request a feature enhancement to the Fix capitalization feature.)

Regards,

Barry

Hello Barry

It seems that at this time, Pages use the system's spell checker but the capitalization tool is the old one so I’m not really surprising by this kind of odd behavior.

It’s only when iWork will be updated according to Mountain Lion that we will may hope that these tools will be consistent.

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) vendredi 27 avril 2012

iMac 21”5, i7, 2.8 GHz, 12 Gbytes, 1 Tbytes, mac OS X 10.6.8 and 10.7.3

My Box account is : http://www.box.com/s/00qnssoyeq2xvc22ra4k

Again, I apologize for having "interrupted" K_Gal's query. And for apparently failing more fully to define (early-on) the dimensions of my problem. Blame it on my age (84) and/or my "amateur" status.

I so admire the thoughtful design of Pages that I'm always surprised when everything doesn't "work" as intuitively expected.

Barry your explanation could not have been more complete. I'm grateful to you.

Message was edited by: RHPC

Here's a quick fix that may help reduce frustration:

When auto-correct changes your text to an undesirable result, immediately hit cmd-z:

The auto-correction will be undone, rather than your last edit, returning the word as you typed it.

You can always manually add a substitution for a regularly occuring auto-correction that you don't want.

For example, I often accidentally type "th e" instead of "the", which Pages annoyingly corrects to "Th. e"!!

So I've added a substitution for "Th. e" to "the" (via the prefs window shown in Barry's post). It looks whacky on screen, changing from "th e" to "Th. e" to "the" in quick succession, but it works.

Clever. Many thanks. With my arthritic fingers I often use ⌘z for correcting my mistyping of words or phrases, but it simply never occurred to me that it could be a key to solving this issue!

How do I assign "Thank you" points to you and Barry? I doubt very much that I could have stumbled across these solutions without your focused help?

To RHPC

You're welcome.

I think only the originator of the thread can assign "Thank you" points...

Good luck.

K_Gal:

Thanks for passing the credit around. Too bad that a "squatter" can't add some additional points. 😁

This was a very helpful crew that came to our somewhat "shared" problem.