Subject: Re: patch: SmartQuotesEnable preference item
From: sam th (sam@uchicago.edu)
Date: Sun Jul 16 2000 - 14:24:55 CDT
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On Sun, 16 Jul 2000, WJCarpenter wrote:
> 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.
Really? That's too bad. I was hoping that you were going to implement it
in remapGlyphs style, so that Smart Quotes existed only in memory, and
were remapped on the fly when the document was loaded. They could even be
printed as smart quotes. As I see it, this would have several advantages:
1) Backwards compatibility. Anyone with 0.7.5 (for example) could still
open the document without problems.
2) Font compatibility. Say you have a platform without a font that
includes smart quotes. AbiWord could still easily run on that.
3) (Related to 2) Different people would not have to know about other's
preferences. If you wnated to use smart quotes, and you sent a document
to me, I wouldn't even be able to tell what your settings were. If I used
Smart Quotes, they would appear just as I wanted them. If I didn't, I
would never see them, just regular ASCII quotes.
4) Makes life easier for other apps. If another app wants to use .abw
files, they don't have to think about Smart Quotes.
MS Word Smart Quotes are just on the fly character replacement, which
isn't that clever. If we did it this way, I think it would really be
'Smart'.
> 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.
>
If you take my suggestion above, then you could just have View->Smart
Quotes. When that was on, you could see them (and print them) and when it
was off, you wouldn't.
> 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 think we should add a button on the Spelling dialog to take the user to
the tab in Options to control spelling option. I know at least some other
WPs allow changing options from the Spelling dialog.
> 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.)
I'm not sure about this (other than that having both is bad). What do
other people think?
sam th
sam@uchicago.edu
http://www.abisource.com/~sam/
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