I regularly contribute walking route descriptions to magazines and have found that having a Scrivener project for each magazine works well, with each document relating to a particular route.
In these route descriptions I often have to provide distances in imperial and metric, so when referring to imperial I need to use fractions 1/2, 1/4 and 3/4 being the most common. Is there a way of displaying these as single characters? I’ve checked out ‘Insert Special Characters’ but fractions don’t seem to be listed there. Is there a way of doing this? I’ve searched the manual for fractions and that doesn’t return what I’m looking for.
In System Preferences > Language & Text > Input Sources, make sure you have Keyboard Character and Viewer selected (in the left hand list), and Show Input Menu in Menu Bar checked.
Choose the Keyboard icon from the menu bar and choose ‘Show Character Viewer’. In the Viewer’s search field, type ‘half’ and you’ll get the ½ fraction. Highlight it and click Add to Favorites. Do the same with ‘third’, ‘quarter’ etc.
Click on the Favorites line in the left hand list. Now, if you keep the Character Viewer on screen, you can just double click on the fraction you want to enter it into the text ½, ⅓ and so on…
There are other ways, but as far as I know, they involve using third party software such as Keyboard Maestro.
You need to go to the gear wheel at the top left of the panel and select Customize and then check the box for digits or math or whatever you want to add.
In OS X 10.6 and greater, just load the Corrections preference pane in Scrivener. Make sure “Symbol and Text Substitution” is enabled at the very bottom, and then click the button “System Text Preferences” to take you to the correct System Pref pane. In there, make sure “Use symbol and text substitution” is checked off, and then enable/add any subs you want. On a default OS X installation, fractions should already be there.