Display as Capitalized -- Title Case

[phspaelti]

I don't really use this feature much myself, but having written some macros related to this I get the feeling that the current implementation of this feature in Nisus is problematic.

The attributes "Display as lowercase", "Display as UPPERCASE" and "Display as Small Caps" are unproblematic. They do what one would expect.

However "Display as Capitalized" is context sensitive. Presumably it works like this:

Code: Select all

    - If the text has a capital/lowercase distinction, then
        - If the preceding character is *not* a word character, then
               [A] Capitalize the character
        - otherwise
               [B] ___lowercase the character___

While [A] is obviously what you want strikes me as wrong. If you apply this to titles containing uppercased words/acronyms like "USA" you get "Usa", etc. If the text contains a name like McCarthy you get Mccarthy, and so on. I can't really imagine any situation where this is useful. Of course one can exempt these words from the style marked portions, but that kind of defeats the purpose of the style in the first place. One might as well just apply "Display as UPPERCASE" to only the first letters of the relevant text.

Of course independent of this issue is a separate feature request that has also come up; namely a 'true' Title case, where only 'important' words are capitalized. (Something that only seems to be used for English, as far as I can tell. Do any other European languages use this? German and French don't seem to…)

So to sum up, I think "Display as Capitalized" should be changed so that it only capitalizes the first character of all the words it has been applied to, and leave other characters unaffected (i.e. display them with their 'natural' capitalization).