From: Virgil Arrington Jr. (virgilarrington@hotmail.com)
Date: Thu Mar 21 2002 - 13:30:37 EST
>there might be some way to allow this but if you can suggest a keybinding
>using Ctrl and a letter we could probably add that instead. (unless we
>have run out of keys already
I'm not exactly enamoured with Ctrl-Alt key combinations. My only point was
that there should be a better way to insert special symbols than selecting
them through a menu system -- that takes too many steps and slows down
typing. Abi already allows for the automatic replacement of "dumb" straight
quotes with "smart" curly quotes. It would be nice to have a similar way to
replace, say two short dashes with a single m-dash or a 1/2 with its
supersubsript alternative. I suppose this is getting on the fringes of
auto-correct, which can be maddening when its correcting things you don't
want corrected, but it seems we have already started down that road with
smartquotes.
>im all for software encouraging laziness, i use software in the hope that
>it is less work than pen and paper.
Agreed, butt ewe don't want you're program replacing you're brain with
spelling that mae bee accurate, but wrong. All too often, I've seen word
processing documents with excess typos only because the words passed the
spell checker.
>but there are some very clever features like "lock styles" which actually
>encourage some very good habits. some programs are so clever that they
>educate users in the best way of doing things.
What are lock styles?
>i suspect abiword has good word support for all the features it can
>actually render, not being able to draw tables and other things being a
>major stumbling block.
Abi's Word compatibility is good, but until its RTF files can save the
default font size to all paragraphs, even blank ones, and save its page
margins correctly, it still needs some work as Abi-saved RTF files reopened
in Word still need to be reformatted.
Virgil
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