Override a strange dictionary quirk in Pages '08

Aug 16, '07 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: robg

One of the Pages '08 features I was most interested in testing out was the support for Word's Track Changes function. At Macworld, we use this all the time as articles fly between writer, editor, and tech reviewer. If it worked well, it would mean I could switch from Word to Pages for my final writing and editing duties (mostly for print; I typically write online stuff in Smultron).

After a trial run, everything was looking great -- the test file exported out, opened in Word with the comments and changes properly tracked, and could pretty much be moved between the two word programs without any issues. Well, there was this one issue, and I'm still not sure if it's local to our setup (somehow), or more widespread. I thought it was only my file that had an issue, but since then, I've edited two others from different writers, and both had the same problem. So I offer this hint in case the issue is more widespread (and in hopes that someone will comment to confirm they've seen this as well).

The only issue we had when moving the files back and forth while using track changes had to do with spelling. Somewhere along the line, the document decided that we should really be writing in (I thought) British English. Words like color were suddenly flagged as incorrect, with the correction showing colour as the correct spelling. I have no idea why this is happening -- perhaps an original style in Word is set up incorrectly, or maybe it's caused by the combination of moving from Word to Pages while using track changes.

The fix is easy, if somewhat annoying to have to do. Select all the text in your document, open the Inspector, go to the Text section, and click on the More tab. Click the Language pop-up menu, and select English as the language. I had track changes enabled when I did this, and I noticed that it flagged many sections of the document to indicate the language change.

As an aside, when I opened this panel for the first time, I discovered that Pages thought we should be using Australian English, not British English as I had assumed. I'm not sure what the differences are, but I do know that regularAmerican English is what we needed to use for our spelling!

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