Automatic correction of plurals

I am using a Mac mini with OS 10.8.5 (Mountain Lion).


In System Preferences > Language & Text > Text, I have turned automatic spelling correction off. Nevertheless, in any word-processing application, such as Pages, Word or TextEdit, if I type two upper-case letters followed by an 's' — typically, since I am sometimes involved in medical matters, 'GPs' — the second upper-case letter is automatically reduced to lower case and I have to go back and raise it manually to upper case.


This even just happened here when I typed the previous sentence. It is clearly a systemic matter, not an application-specific one. I repeat: in System Preferences > Language & Text > Text, I have turned automatic spelling correction off.


What can I do to discourage the system's eagerness to improve my writing?

Mac mini, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.5)

Posted on Jul 2, 2016 4:22 AM

Reply
28 replies

Jul 2, 2016 5:47 AM in response to Esquared

Thank you, Esquared, for replying so promptly. But you perhaps missed what I said in my posting: this unwanted autocorrection even happens when I type here in these discussions — not using any application at all. It is a systemic problem, not an application-specific one (as I also said above). For the record, autocorrection is turned off in Word and Pages.

Jul 2, 2016 10:06 AM in response to Tom Gewecke

I suppose offensive remarks may be tolerable when they are accurate, Tom Gewecke, but not when they are incorrect. I have looked through this by now quite extensive correspondence, and I see that I have mentioned system preferences precisely once — in my first posting.


To save further repetitions (three so far) of my statement that in the applications that I generally use (including my browser) 'Correct spelling automatically' (autocorrection) is turned OFF, I will list the applications in which I have checked that it is turned off: Safari, Pages, Word, TextEdit, Mellel and Excel (in which, as well as ordinary autocorrection, there is a special 'Correct two capitals automatically' feature, which is also turned off. None of these allows me to type text like 'GPs'.

Jul 2, 2016 10:58 AM in response to Michael Graubart

Other then there being some 3rd party text helper around, like Tom suggested, the only thing I can think of for now is a quick-and-dirty workaround (which is only practical if you don't need too many exclusions). Go to Settings > Keyboard > Text and put the 'wrongly' spelled combination in the Replace column and the combination you want in the With column.


I haven't been able to reproduce the issue myself, which makes it hard to investigate. 🙂

Jul 3, 2016 8:31 AM in response to Michael Graubart

I decided I would try Tom Gewecke's suggestion. I created a new user's account, and lo and behold the problem was cured. But I then found that I would have to recreate so many things — from desktop picture and screensaver to the contents of the Dock, and no doubt much else — that I decided to go back to my old user's account.


So I am still in the market for any further suggestions for curing this irritating problem. Thank you in anticipation.

Jul 3, 2016 8:51 AM in response to Michael Graubart

Michael Graubart wrote:


I decided I would try Tom Gewecke's suggestion. I created a new user's account, and lo and behold the problem was cured.


So that indicates something is amiss in the main account. You should check system prefs/users and groups/login items to make sure nothing odd is being started up when you log in. Another possibility is a bad .plist in Home/Library/Preferences. One way to check that is to move that folder to your desktop and restart. That should regenerate the .plists. The ones on the desktop can be put back if you need to regain certain settings. To get to Home/Library you need to hold down the Option key while doing Finder > Go.

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Automatic correction of plurals

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