Subject: Re: patch: SmartQuotesEnable preference item
From: WJCarpenter (bill-abisource@carpenter.ORG)
Date: Sun Jul 16 2000 - 11:40:53 CDT
sam> Committed. One suggestion: I doubt there will be enough items in
sam> that tab to justify it's being a tab by itself. Could it be
sam> combined with the view tab?
That is something I have pondered with no clearly obvious right
solution. I would value the opinions of others on this point.
The reason I didn't put it on the View tab is that creation of smart
quotes on the fly isn't just presentation. It actually will change
ASCII quotes to Unicode curly quotes in the document itself.
I also thought about just having it be a checkbox menu item off the
Tools drop-down, although the next item to be added for smart quotes
is an action, not a preference, and doesn't fit well there. (That
action is a synchronous scan of the entire document or current
selection to create or purge all smart quote instances.) Of course,
it also doesn't fit well as something under Tools->Options.
Maybe the best solution would be for there to be a Tools->Smart Quotes
item that opened a widget that had both the on-the-fly preference item
and the action buttons for the synchronous scans.
The situations closely parallels spellchecking, which is currently
split between Tools->Spelling and Tools->Options->Spelling. I'm not
so sure that's such a great split. More than once I've clicked
Tools->Spelling expecting to tweak a spelling preference item and been
reminded that I'm in the wrong place.
I guess if there were a Tools->Options->Misc, that would be an OK
place for the single SmartQuotesEnable preference item to appear. (I
don't think there will be additional preference items for smart
quotes.)
And while we're at it, would Tools->Preferences be a better name than
Tools->Options. (At least we have the sanity of only one menu of that
sort. Some companies with large market share sometimes have both
Preferences and Options in the same application. Go figure.)
-- bill@carpenter.ORG (WJCarpenter) PGP 0x91865119 38 95 1B 69 C9 C6 3D 25 73 46 32 04 69 D6 ED F3
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