If you’re typing on a Mac, you have a variety of options for entering drawn or “real” fractions, those that are rendered typographically to resemble those that appear in a recipe or book. I’ve talked about it before in “How to Use the macOS Character Viewer to Type Emoji and Other Symbols” and “How to Insert Fractions in Word and Pages.”
But what happens if you type an email or other text on your iPhone or iPad? Their operating systems lack something as simple as a character palette. However, you can rely on the free Pages app that Apple offers to all iPhone and iPad owners. After installing, if you don’t have it, and launching Pages, follow these steps:
- Create a new document by tapping the + (plus) icon in the upper right corner of the Pages app.
- Faucet Start writing.
- Tap the … button in a circle (More) in the upper right corner.
- Swipe down to find the Settings icon and tap it.
- Tap AutoCorrect and turn on auto-formatting fractions. (It may already be enabled.)
Now, when you type most single-digit fractions, Pages automatically reformats them. You must type a space before and another character (such as a space or dash) after for Pages to perform its transformation. For example, type a space, the number 1, a slash, the number 2, then a space, and Pages produces ½. (This also works in Numbers.)
You can enter fractions as you go in Pages, and the app automatically reformats them into more compact versions drawn in the font.
Foundry
Once you have your message or even just the fractions you need, copy and paste them into an Email or other document.
You can also find fractions in standard Unicode format by searching for them on the web and then copying and pasting them into an email or document. This bucket page displays all common typographic or cartoon fractions as links to individual character pages where, when you get there, you can copy the fraction as a single character.
If you commonly use fractions, you can type or paste the ones you rely on most into a Pages document, then copy them from there to other Pages files or other locations as needed.
This Mac 911 article responds to a question submitted by igamesnews reader Bill.
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