Pages 2: ‘Smart quotes’ feature prevents user from doing manual replacements with Find/Replace dialog

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Pages
March 15th, 2006 • 10:16 am

Pages 2 has a new “automatic correction” feature which, among other things, replaces straight apostrophes and quotation marks with curly ones as you type them.

The trouble with this feature is that it also affects the Find/Replace feature, with a “smarter-than-thou” approach that is almost absurd.

Here’s what exactly happens.

  1. If the option to replace straight apostrophes and quotation marks with curly ones is OFF in the application’s preferences, and if you ask Pages to replace a straight apostrophe or quotation mark with a curly one (either curled to the left or curled to the right) in the Find/Replace dialog, Pages 2 replaces the straight apostrophe or quotation mark with… a straight apostrophe or quotation mark.
  2. If the option to replace straight apostrophes and quotation marks with curly ones is ON in the application’s preferences, and if you ask Pages to replace a straight apostrophe or quotation mark with a curly one (either curled to the left or curled to the right) in the Find/Replace dialog, Pages 2 replaces the straight apostrophe or quotation mark with… a curly apostrophe or quotation, but it completely ignores the orientation you’ve specified in the “Replace:” field and uses the orientation that it prefers (i.e. curled to the right at the beginning of a word and curled to the left at the end of a word or inside a word).
  3. If the option to replace straight apostrophes and quotation marks with curly ones is OFF in the application’s preferences, and if you ask Pages to replace a curly apostrophe or quotation mark with a straight one in the Find/Replace dialog, Pages 2 replaces the curly apostrophe or quotation mark with a straight apostrophe or quotation mark, as expected (but not because you specified that you wanted to replace it with a straight one in the “Replace:” field, only because the option is OFF in the preferences).
  4. If the option to replace straight apostrophes and quotation marks with curly ones is ON in the application’s preferences, and if you ask Pages to replace a straight apostrophe or quotation mark with a curly one (either curled to the left or curled to the right) in the Find/Replace dialog, Pages 2 replaces the straight apostrophe or quotation mark with… a curly apostrophe or quotation, but it completely ignores the orientation you’ve specified in the “Replace:” field and uses the orientation that it prefers (i.e. curled to the right at the beginning of a word and curled to the left at the end of a word or inside a word).

Great, isn’t it? This means that Pages 2 refuses to respect your choice as specified in the “Replace:” field altogether. Whether it is ON or OFF, the application’s preference for automatic replacements supersedes whatever you might specify manually in the Find/Replace dialog box.

This is especially irritating, of course, if, like me, you use a third-party tool such as Spell Catcher X to handle your automatic replacements for you in all your applications, and not just in Pages.

In that case, you’ll want to turn Pages’s automatic feature off, so that it doesn’t interfere with Spell Catcher. But then it still interferes with your work because turning the feature OFF actually causes Pages to remove curly apostrophes and quotation marks whenever it gets the chance, without asking for your permission!

Grrr.


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