So there's several different ways to type fractions on your Mac. You may have already
noticed that if you type some common fractions like one half using a number, like one then
the slash key on your keyboard and then another number like two, you get a little suggestion
there for a special character that's a ½ character. If you just hit the spacebar it
actually replaces that automatically. This happens with a variety of different fractions.
Two thirds, ⅔, for instance. You can see they look a little different. So what are
these?
These are actually special characters. When you type one slash two and hit the spacebar
it automatically replaces those three characters you've typed with the one character that looks
like a ½ fraction. You can see this if you go to System Preferences, Keyboard, and Text
for text replacement. There are several default text replacements replacing one slash two
with the ½ character, one slash three with ⅓ character, and two slash three with ⅔.
So what are these special characters? Well, if you type Control Command Space you come
up with this Special Character and Emoji viewer here. If you search for fraction you can see
a lot of these. There's actually more than just those three there. So there's the ½
and there's the ⅓. One fifth, two fifths all the way to four fifths. There's only one
sixth and five sixth. There's one eighth, three eighths, five eighths, and seven eights.
So there's a bunch of different ones here. Even one seventh, one ninth, and one tenth.
These are special characters that are part of like the universal character set that all
computers have. So you can actually use the ¼ character, I can just click on that and
this is a single character, and that should show up okay on just about any computer.
Now what if you want to use a fraction that's not one of those few that have special characters.
Well, you have some options. The main option, and what most people use, is just use the
slash key on your keyboard. So, for instance, if I wanted to type three sevenths I would
just type 3 slash 7. This is so universally used that it's okay pretty much in any circumstance
to use it. Maybe with the exception of the nicest typeset things like posters or something
like that. But typically you can see this everywhere. You can see this in textbooks.
You can see this in examples online and everything.
Now this is a very important method of doing it because it's a method that the computer
understands when you're doing math calculations. So for instance I'll do Command Space to bring
up Spotlight here. If I type 3/7 you can see it actually calculates the result. So in any
math equation I want to definitely use this technique. So it's nice sometimes when the
way that you put something to be in a nice word processing document and the way you type
something into Spotlight or Calculator or some other type of app it's the same. The
same characters that you type. So you can just use a slash for fractions.
Now you can make things look a little bit better. For instance I can select that first
character there and I can go and change it to Baseline to make it superscript and then
maybe make this second character here, the second number, the Baseline subscript. That
creates a nicer looking fraction. As a matter of fact you even have the option to use a
different slash. So you may have noticed when I do Control Command Space and search for
fractions that there's another slash there. You can see that slash is a little bit more
of a diagonal line than the other one. So you can use that.
There are other things that you could do. You can decide to shrink the size of these
numbers a little bit. You can use the Baseline to, you know, raise and lower a little bit.
Or even make the denominator default. There's lots of things that you can do. You can play
around with it until you get something that looks like what you want to see. So you have
that option as well.
In Pages you have another option because in Pages you can do mathematical formulas using
Insert, Equation. Now you think you would be able to type something like 3/7 and get
a nice looking fraction. But in fact you don't. You just get 3/7. It looks like maybe it doesn't
do anything special with fractions. But there's a special function there. If you do a back
slash, not a regular slash but a back slash, and Frac, that's a special function, then
you do curly brackets and the first number, the numerator, and then curly brackets with
the second number, the denominator, you get a nice fraction. You can put any number you
want in there. So thirteen seventy sevenths, for instance. Or seven hundred and seventy
sevenths. You just do Insert and then you get your fraction.
This is kind of like an little image here. So I can Copy that and I can say switch over
to TextEdit here and Paste that in. It's going to want to make sure it's a format that can
handle that. You can paste it into Mail. So you can do these cool fractions using the
Insert, Equation function in Pages and then go ahead and Copy and Paste that elsewhere
if you need it somewhere else.
Oh, and a couple quick notes here. If you're using Microsoft Word you can also do Insert,
Equation but you don't have to do any special functions there. You can just actually type
3/7 and hit Return and it will convert it to a cool little fraction there. In addition,
whether you're using TextEdit, Pages, Word, whatever, if you want to type the divide symbol,
like you actually want to do an equation and show divide, just hold Option and then the
regular slash and then you get the division symbol.