From: F J Franklin (F.J.Franklin@sheffield.ac.uk)
Date: Tue Mar 05 2002 - 08:42:09 GMT
On Mon, 4 Mar 2002, F J Franklin wrote:
> > I noticed people are requirind features... what about capitalize first
> > letter of sentence.
>
> Is it just me? I really hate this kind of feature. Word does it to me and
> makes me scream and I have to go searching for the box to check that says
> "Don't capitalize the first letter! If I'd wanted a capital letter I'd've
> pressed the [] shift key!"
Francisco, this wasn't a personal attack, and the tempest (yikes!) wasn't
directed at you. My rage is against MS Word which I am forced to use a
great deal, and the need to check the defaults with every install to turn
off pointless features.
This is a bad feature, in the same way that spell-checking is a bad
feature - they may be useful features but they encourage laziness. It gets
to the point of: "Why bother pressing the shift key, just let []Word
capitalize the first word for me..." and "No need to check the spelling,
there aren't any red squiggles so it must be fine..." But it isn't exactly
hard to press the shift key, and the spelling may bee wrong despite the
absence of read squiggles...
Don't bite my head off. I know there are good justifications for a spell
checker, especially for people who suffer from dyslexia, or for non-native
speakers, and may the gods forgive me but even I find the English spell
checker useful - though we do argue about, e.g., -ize vs -ise.
The only justifiable use I can think of for auto-capitalization is for
people who speed-type. Curious: Does anybody use AbiWord for speed-typing?
My opinion, apparently shared by most of the developers, is that this is
not a feature we want.
Anyway, I suspect that auto-capitalization is a feature of the grammer
checker, which AbiWord doesn't have - yet?
Ciao, Frank
Francis James Franklin
F.J.Franklin@shef.ac.uk
It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and
wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again.
That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong.
--- Philip Roth
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