Comments on: Autocomplete in Pages?

Question: Autocomplete in Pages?

spaceman_spiff — Fri, 09 May 2008 19:14:29 -0800

How can I get Pages to mimic Open Office's autocomplete?

I've recently made a partial switch from Open Office/NeoOffice to Pages. I like the way Pages does styles, and it's a lot lighter weight on my Powerbook than OO/NO. But it's missing my absolute to-die-for favorite feature - autocomplete.

In Open Office, as I type, words longer than a certain threshold are added to a list; if I type the first 3-4 letters of a word in the list later on in a document, the rest of the word appears highlighted after my cursor, and I can choose to hit enter and complete the word, or just keep typing. It's absolutely fabulous, and my wrists are complaining bitterly about Pages' lack of a similar feature. Is there a plugin or hack - or best of all a checkbox I missed - for Pages that would replicate this feature?

By: electric_counterpoint

electric_counterpoint — Fri, 09 May 2008 20:43:03 -0800

Holy crap, that sounds awesome. I don't think that feature existed when I demo'd OOO a few years ago... Anyway, I came in here to suggest Typinator, but that still requires you to add abbreviations manually. As it stands, I'll watch this thread to see if anyone has an idea.

By: electric_counterpoint

electric_counterpoint — Fri, 09 May 2008 20:59:34 -0800

A little searching turned up this unresolved Ask.Mefi from 2005. Also of interest may be this Wikipedia article and this one.

My take is, first, it's definitely not as easy as clicking a checkbox in Pages or in MS Word, and I fear that without a solution built into the program, a piece of software running globally wouldn't know what list of words to draw from. As the first article I linked mentioned, if you feed a text-completion program the whole English dictionary, the cognitive overhead required to choose between typing the next letter and checking the suggestion is non-trivial. If this is the only solution available right now, well, I'd personally opt to keep my typing trivial.

By: AaRdVarK

AaRdVarK — Fri, 09 May 2008 21:33:07 -0800

In any Mac application that uses the standard textfield, you can type part of work, press Escape, and you'll get a list of autocomplete words. Unfortunately, the reach up to the escape key seriously slows down typing, but for really long words you may like it.

By: electric_counterpoint

electric_counterpoint — Fri, 09 May 2008 21:37:06 -0800

Whoops — that first Wikipedia link should point here. Okay, somebody else talk.

By: spaceman_spiff

spaceman_spiff — Fri, 09 May 2008 22:54:12 -0800

AaRdVarK: that doesn't scratch the itch I asked about, but it scratches a different itch I had. This is why I love Mefi.