On Sun, 7 Oct 2007 12:45:22 +0100 Séamas Ó Brógáin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> dijo:
> John wrote: > > > First, for the sake of those who are not aware of what we are talking > > about, in English the first letter of most words are capitalized, but > > not for "unimportant" words . . . > > That's not a very good formulation of best practice. (Why are certain > words "unimportant"?) They're not really unimportant. The term "unimportant" is what my English teachers in school used. They needed a term for the words that should not be capitalized, and there is no rhyme or reason to the rule. However, all the words that should not be capitalized are function words, not content words. > Capitalise all words except definite and indefinite articles (the, a, > an) and unstressed prepositions and conjunctions. As I said before, there are dozens of style manuals in use just in the U.S. Adding up the options from the rest of the world and it becomes clear why programs like OOo have a utility to capitalize all words in a selection, but not for skipping certain ones. Which ones you should leave lowercase depends on the style manual you are using. Worse, most that I have found require the last word of the title to be capitalized even if it is otherwise an "unimportant" word. I believe that Microsoft Office does do a title case which leaves certain words uncapitalized. However, in order to do so, they wrote their own style manual (called Microsoft Style), intending that the whole world would standardize on it. What would be cool would be a macro that would do the following: 1) Convert the selection of all lowercase (because title case doesn't work on uppercase) 2) Convert the selection to title case 3) Search for all instances of the articles, certain conjunctions, and certain prepositions, convert them to lowercase 4) Make sure the first word and the last word in the selection is in title case The problem is (3). Which words should remain lowercase would have to be user configurable because of the various style manuals. I would suggest a small database containing the words that should remain lowercase, which the user can edit. But I'm not a programmer, so I leave the design up to someone smarter. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
