MacOS – How to copy global text substitution settings into iWork ’09 (Keynote, Pages)

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Amazingly, a year after Lion has been released, iWork still does not support Lion / ML's global text substitution settings.

I use these widely for special technical symbols.

Although global text substitution is not supported in iWork, Keynote and Pages do have their own local text substitution function, which performs the same as the global one, but doesn't use the global settings.

My problem? I have about 100 text substitutions set up in Lion, so entering them in each iWork application would take an age.

Does anyone know a way (e.g. by editing preference files etc.) to transfer all the settings from Lion's text substitution feature into Keynote and Pages?

This would be a huge time saver for me.

Best Answer

The substitutions for Pages.app are stored in: ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iWork.Pages.plist

Specifically they are in Root/kSFWPAutoSubstitutionArrayProperty. The format is a an array containing dictionaries with the keys replace, with and on.

The Global Substitutions are located at ~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist. Specifically, they are in Root/NSUserReplacementItems. The format, conveniently, is identical.

It's probably possible just to open ~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist as plain text and copy across what you want into ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iWork.Pages.plist.

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