RE: dogfood feedback -- Smart Quotes


Subject: RE: dogfood feedback -- Smart Quotes
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Tue Mar 27 2001 - 19:46:48 CST


At 03:17 PM 3/27/01 -0800, WJCarpenter wrote:
>It is very common to be inserting text via cut-and-paste from plain
>ASCII files. In such a case, you are likely to want the promotion.

Good example. If I paste several paragraphs of unpromoted ASCII text, and
autopromote all the quotes in that span, then what would the undo
granularity be? All of them? One at a time in reverse order? I don't
know.

Of course, the counter-example is unpromoted content inside my existing
document. If I copy & paste that content, then it should *stay* unpromoted,
no?

Hmm.

>This could be mitigated by the presence of a feature that did smart
>quote promotion (or demotion) on a selection.

I like this alternative a lot. It's an atomic user-driven operation, and
the undo granularity is clear. Where would it go in the UI? Somewhere near
Change Case in the tools menu? What would the shortcuts be? Control-quote
and control-shift-quote?

:-)

>There may be fewer occasions to do smart quote promotion, or a better
>integration point might be identified, but I am confident that "only
>when typing" is too limiting.

OK. I'm just asking the questions to make sure we've walked through all the
cases to define what Just Works.

My latest guess is that just typing plus a selection-driven shortcut would
handle everything and make for unambiguous undos, but that's just my latest
guess. More examples and counterexamples, anyone?

Paul,
motto -- design is fun



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