Occasionally, when writing something in Pages, you might type the word “may” (the verb, not the month), only to watch as Pages automatically reformats the word to “May.” Since you probably write “may” more often than “May,” you might want to turn off this automatic correction “feature” in Pages. (You’ll only see this effect if you’ve enabled Fix Capitalization in the Auto-Correction tab of Pages’ preferences.)
Control-click on the Pages application (in the iWork ’06 folder) and choose Show Package Contents. Then navigate to Contents -> Frameworks -> SFWordProcessing.framework -> Versions -> A -> Resources -> English.lproj, and open AutoCorrect.plist. If you use Property List Editor (the default application that opens, if you have the Developer Tools installed—they are on the XCode disc included with Mac OS X), click on the triangle for Root, then the triangle for capitalizationDictionary. Change whichever values you want, and save your changes. To fix the may/May issue, for example, you can either delete the entry, or just change its replacement to lowercase.
Note that many of the text replacements are in the AutoCorrect.plist file, whereas most of the symbol replacements (e.g. replacing … with an ellipse, or (c) with ©) are part of the preferences file in your preferences folder, because these items are editable within Pages.
Now you’d think this would work for Keynote as well as Pages. But, despite having a capitalization plist file buried in its application bundle, Keynote doesn’t seem to use that file at all. To enable this feature, make sure Keynote isn’t running, then open Terminal and type this command:
defaults write com.apple.iWork.Keynote kSFWPFixCapitalizationProperty 1
Launch Keynote, and you’ll find that “iwork” will now become “iWork,” and “may” will become “May.” To modify which words are capitalized, you can proceed as you did for Pages. Control-click on the Keynote application and choose Show Package Contents, then navigate to Contents -> Frameworks -> SFWordProcessing.framework -> Versions -> A -> Resources -> English.lproj, and open the file named AutoCorrect.plist. Click on the triangle for Root, then the triangle for capitalizationDictionary, and change whichever values you want.
If you ever tire of the automatic corrections, quit Keynote and re-run the above command, but replace the 1 with a 0 (zero).