Subject: Autotext [was Re: The rest of the irregularities in strings]
From: Alan (horkana@tcd.ie)
Date: Tue May 08 2001 - 07:09:49 CDT
[RFC re:Autotext]
I dont get the whole Auto text, as implemented in Abiword. It it were really
automatic and i could get it to insert just by typing "to:" and have it
automatically replaced it might be more useful ie shorthand rather than auto
text, but if we had a short hand system it would have to be usercustomizable.
Particularly some of the Autotext items make no sense to me. As someone who
can type fairly well, it is way faster to just type "To:" than to take my
hands off the keyboard and click the menu, the submenu, and another submenu.
This may just be an arguement for more/better shortcut keys or user definable
shortcuts, which i expect the perl binding would allow as a form of custom
macro.
I would have thought that kind of information should be in a template. So
what im trying to get at is when the templates are available the Autotext menu
items should be dropped or changed substantially.
RFC
Tim Allen wrote:
> >To Whom it may Concern: German has Liebe Vater und Mutter.
>
> >Dear Mom and Dad: German has Sehr veehrte Damen und Herren.
>
> IMHO these are perfectly OK, since the point of the feature is to allow
> insertion of common bits of text; common in the user's language. The way
> it's implemented is a bit limited and limiting, but 't'will do for a
> start. It'd be pointless for each translator to attempt a literal
> translation of each item, since the text as translated may not be in
> common use in that country. What the translator has to do instead is pick
> some common bits of text (and pick exactly the same number of common bits
> of text as the original en_US coder) and put them in. Certainly, if I
> translated "Sincerely yours," into Indonesian (yg tulus, loh! :-) ), I
> wouldn't be optimistic of that being of any use to anyone.
>
> BTW, this has one obvious flaw as currently implemented: the user may be
> typing in a language different to the language of the user interface.
> Localisation of this text should depend on the language properties of the
> text section, not the language of the UI (wow, great new feature: you can
> type a letter in a language you don't know; won't that impress
> everyone....) Ideally, it would also be better if we could be more
> flexible in determining the number of bits of text since, for example, not
> all languages have exactly the same number of common ways of ending a
> letter. And, better yet, allow each user to maintain their own repertoire
> of useful inclusions.
>
> BTW^2, does "Dear Mom and Dad" _really_ deserve a spot in the menus? I
> realise that "American undergraduate university students studying at
> campuses remote from their town of origin" is a significant part of the
> current userbase (and developer base), but is it such a major target
> market that they deserve a whole menu item to themselves? :-)
>
> BTW^3 id_ID update RSN, so if anyone plans another release imminently I'd
> really appreciate someone sending me a wake-up call.
>
> Tim
>
> --
> -----------------------------------------------
> Tim Allen tim@proximity.com.au
> Proximity Pty Ltd http://www.proximity.com.au/
> http://www4.tpg.com.au/users/rita_tim/
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