Arrow symbols when typing....

Open System Preferences and select the International pane. Choose the "Input Menu" tab. Put a check in the box labeled "Show input menu in menu bar". Now any character from any font installed on your machine will be available from the little flag menu in the menu bar.

in Microsoft word you can do --> and it formats into an arrow

You can set this up in Pages as well:

Select Preferences > Auto-Correction.
Enable Symbol and text substitution, if it isn't already enabled, and be sure to uncheck any corrections you don't want.
Press the + button to add a new, empty correction.
Type "-->" in the Replace field.
For the with field, select Edit > Special Characters....
Make sure the toolbar is visible in the Character Palette window (use the lozenge-shaped widget at the far right of the title bar), and set the view to "Roman," if it isn't already.
Select the Arrows category, and choose the arrow that best fits your needs (double-click it while the with field is still active). Be sure to tab out of the with field to commit the change.
Now when you type "-->" followed by a space, tab, or return, it will be replaced by the arrow character.

As for option-up-arrow, that has special meaning to Pages (move the insertion caret to the beginning of the paragraph). If you want to override this behavior, you'll need to look into some sort of 3rd party macro software.

Titanium PowerBook Mac OS X (10.4.9)

Thanks for the tip and precise instructions Bekins.

Does anyone know how to trigger auto correction after the fact? For example, if I have a Word document with " " in it and I have set up Pages to auto correct "" into another character, when I open the Word document in Pages the " " comes through just as typed, without the correction. It would be nice to be able to tell Pages to go through the document and make the corrections to all such instances in the document.
Thanks in advance.
Mark

Wow, there's auto correction on this forum.

I had typed " < t t > " (without the spaces) in my previous post but it got converted to " ".

Just do a Find and replace [command-F]

Copy what you are looking for into the Find field and what you would like to replace it with in the Replace field.

If you want to do more complex GREP like find and replace, do it in BBedit or TextMate and bring it back in. Unfortunately you will need to reformat the plain text resulting.

Coming from the PC you will be used to cumbersome workarounds for many characters because there are not sensible keyboard shortcuts for them. The Mac has a lot of these odd characters straight off the keyboard. Especially for typographic niceties and european accented characters.

e.g typing "option- *" makes a bullet "•", opt-u then a vowel gets you ä, ë, ï, ö and ü as another example. The spanish tilde is similarly opt-n = ñ and so on. They make sense by association, so you quickly learn them. The others you find via the character pallet that lets you get at the enormous range of Unicode characters.

Look up Apple's support pages to learn them.

Just do a Find and replace [command-F]

Copy what you are looking for into the Find field and what you would like to replace it with in the Replace field.

If you want to do more complex GREP like find and replace, do it in BBedit or TextMate and bring it back in. Unfortunately you will need to reformat the plain text resulting.

Coming from the PC you will be used to cumbersome workarounds for many characters because there are not sensible keyboard shortcuts for them. The Mac has a lot of these odd characters straight off the keyboard. Especially for typographic niceties and european accented characters.

e.g typing "option- *" makes a bullet "•", opt-u then a vowel gets you ä, ë, ï, ö and ü as another example. The spanish tilde is similarly opt-n = ñ and so on. They make sense by association, so you quickly learn them. The others you find via the character pallet that lets you get at the enormous range of Unicode characters.

Look up Apple's support pages to learn them.

Yes, one could do find and replace, but we're talking about several hundred occurences of maybe 20 different characters per document, so I was hoping that we could get the auto correct feature to take some of the load off our find and replace routine.

Cheers,

Mark

Always a problem when you venture too far into the woods without a map 🙂

20 occurrences is hardly major. Even if you have to manually do it. If you have several documents all with the same problem. Set up each search with its Find and Replace then select each file in turn to run it on. Working your way through stystematically is probably the most pragmatic solution to retrospectively fix the problem.

Meanwhile set up your substitutions in Prefernces so it won't happen again.

In my work I do my word processing in a Text Editor (in my case iText Express - 5 thumbs up] then bring the text into my document.

GREP will also handle replacements easily in BBedit or similar.

You can try retaining the formatting as .rtf and work around it or use AppleScript to automate the sequence of searches and replacements.

You will find AppleScript in your Applications folder. AppleScript's Script Editor lets you write scripts that will automate tasks not only within applications but also between them and Finder. It can be enormously powerful.

In Script Editor go File > Open Dictionary and look for Pages. The dictionary will give you the terms you need to control the application using AppleScript.

Once you have the script sorted out to do whatever you want, you save it as a script or application. This can be run independently or used by Automator (also in Applications) to do similar tasks at call or on some schedule you set.

As you can see there are several ways to skin this cat. Whichever has the least effort attached or gives longer term benefits is up to you.

It depends on how much formatting you have already done as to whether you clean up the text manually, use GREP in a texteditor or use AppleScript/Automator to make an applet.