Hi all,
I have read
this older thread about including case sensitive forms of certain glyphs (that thread veered a bit off-topic, and my question is a bit tangential to it, so I’m starting a new thread); it got me wondering: Is it common practice to put case specific substitutions (like for parens, dashes) into the CASE feature? I worry that this approach would be pretty fragile, considering that many people may never actually use the CASE feature but just TYPE IN ALL-CAPS, which would then not trigger the substitutions.
How about a CALT feature instead that substitutes these glyphs if they have nothing but caps, punctuation and spaces around them (or; no lowercase). Does anyone do this? Thinking it might be a bit hairy to determine the exact permissible trigger sets, but if that can be worked out such an approach could be more bulletproof? Curious to hear opinions.
Comments
Somewhere around this tweet it was
* In the past, I've used the change-to-lowercase option to undo a client's gratuitous use of all caps text, for example.
Even if the text is entered in all caps, applying the all caps style will invoke the case feature. Of course you need to know it works that way to know to do it.
They don't claim to do the same thing. That's why there are two different options. One of them formats text as uppercase. The other converts text to uppercase character codes. Generally the former is preferable, but occasionally the latter, depending on what one is doing.
I try to avoid being too clever with the <calt> feature, on the principle that when I’M the user, I hate it when software does my thinking for me, especially without letting me know.
I don’t provide cased alternate punctuation as much as I used to, as I have come to the conclusion it is not only largely unnecessary, but counter-productive.
Not just for the bouncey-ness Chris identifies.
For instance, raising the hyphen after /E and /F makes it look as if it has just broken off from the middle stroke of those glyphs; the default low position provides better distinction/legibility.