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British English in Apple iWork - Pages 09 for Mac OS X
- Details
- Category: Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard
- Published Date
- Written by angusf
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Pages has been quietly driving me nuts for months now. I am trying to use it instead of Microsoft Word but have used Word since it first came out on the Mac so this is a hard unlearning exercise.
The main issue for me has been the stubborn refusal of Pages 09 to recognise British English spelling, and stick to it throughout the document.
Pages has a property inspector, which has a Text Tab, once you find this you can observe the problem. One of the elements is 'Language' For me, even when I modified it the next time I added a new styled paragraph it would be back to 'English' and not 'British English'. No matter what I did this would happen. And the templates all defaulted to 'English' making them borderline unusable for me.
I scratched my head about this for a long time. I determined it must be a system setting but could not find anyplace to set it. Looking in the Language and Text Preference Pane provided no immediate clues. English was at the top of the language list, British English was set in the Text tab, UK formats were set in the formats tab.
Eventually I found the answer. It should have been obvious I suppose, but it was not to me, so I hope this is helpful to you.
You have to click 'Edit List' and enable 'British English' to make it show up on the Language list. Quit and restart Pages 09 and hey presto, everything is in British English. Simple. No not really. It took me a long time to figure this out and I have been using Mac OS X since 2000.
