How to convert capital letters to non-capital letters?

Vito,

You can change non-caps to caps from within Pages. Highlight the text you want changed, then click on Format > Font > Capitalization > All Caps.

There's a second way to do it. Many of us have downloaded a terrific utility called Devon Word Services that places a new item in the Services menu. In addition to what you describe, DWS does a bunch of other useful things. Find it here: Devon Word Service: http://www.devon-technologies.com/download/index.html

-Dennis

There is a nice application(?) called Wordservice from Devon Technologies. When installed it appears in the services menu item (under the application menu). It will do caps to lower case and many other formatting functions. There is also a word and character counter and, separately, a little thing called calc service. I find it very helpful. You can download it free from Version Tracker.

Jim W.

MacBook Mac OS X (10.4.8)

MacBook Mac OS X (10.4.8) Al 15" 1.25 MHz

I said in my previous post that you can change non-caps to caps from within Pages. Your question was about changing caps to non-caps, and you can do it the same way. Format > Font > Capitalization > None.

-Dennis

The Service menu is neat but there are so many services it gets to be a pain to navigate. There are some third party utilities that help with this:

Service Scrubber, which allows you to easily remove services you do not use so you do not see them in the menu. They can also be easily placed back in the Services menu.

In conjunction with Service Scrubber you can use icecoffee which allows you to:

• See the services menu in the main menu in all apps.
• Access Service by control click on links, selected text, etc.

Great article summing up all this:
Macworld: Mac Gems: Get Better Service(s)

Kurt

Thanks, Kurt. I knew there was something out there that did this. I even asked Devon Technologies if there was a way to add WordService to contextual menus & they didn't know. WordService does so many things I miss from AppleWorks, either built-in to AppleWorks or with AppleScripts.

Vito,

We're both partially right. The "None" selection works if the caps were made by going through the All-Caps procedure. But it doesn't work if the caps were made using the Caps Lock key. Odd behavior.

-Dennis

Hi DennisG

This initially seemed odd to me too.

I think it is because Pages retains the original Unicode character and regards capitalization as a formatting change - not a change to the character code itself. To illustrate, type the sentence "Dinner is booked for Dennis and Ian on Friday afternoon at 1pm." into Pages. You will notice that as you toggle between All Caps and None for the Capitalization setting, the appropriate case is preserved for things like proper nouns and the start of the sentence. Not a big deal for one sentence but imagine you had hundreds or thousands of sentences that you wanted in the same style and wished to experiment with presenting them in capitals!

Pages isn't alone in doing this. Microsoft Word on Windows behaves the same way if you select the All caps check box in the Font dialog. Word provides a separate Change Case ... menu option that seems to permanently convert the actual characters instead of their appearance.

I think it would be useful for Pages to have a similar feature and suggest that Vito submits feedback in the normal manner.

iMac 17" Flat Panel (OS X 10.4.8)

Hi Ian,

Thanks for the clarification on the caps issue. Also, thanks for the dinner invitation. I'll do my best to be on time, but I have long way to travel.

-Dennis

The Services menu and Devon Word Services is the best free alternative. You get the following:

In the "whatever app you are using"/Services/convert menu:
All Caps
Initial Caps of Sentences
Initial Caps of Words
Lowercase

Kurt