Re: Atlantis and Abi/inserting symbols

From: Virgil Arrington Jr. (virgilarrington@hotmail.com)
Date: Thu Mar 21 2002 - 17:07:57 EST

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    > > if i remember correctly Atlantis has a toolbar item for inserting
    >symbols,
    > > how about if Abiword did the same?
    > > File an RFE, Grab a small screenshot of Atlantis put it on the web and
    > > add a link to the bug report.
    >
    >I'd love to see a screenshot of this. On the extras toolbar in Abi,
    >there is a button to insert a symbol.

    I can only speak of my personal preferences and I realize I'm not the
    typical user. To me, word processing means typing and I will do just about
    anything to find a keyboard shortcut to mousing around. The mouse slows me
    down dramatically. I very rarely, if ever, use toolbars and their buttons.
    While a toolbar button is better than navigating a bunch of menu options, it
    still requires me to take my hands off the keyboard. For a lot of tasks,
    that's not a problem, but inserting a symbol should be as easy as inserting
    a letter. I use m-dashes a lot -- probably too much -- and it would be nice
    to quickly insert them as I type. With Atlantis, that is done with
    "Ctrl-Alt -" I understand that may not be possible with Abi due to its
    cross-platform nature. With Word's autocorrect, each time I type --, it
    gets replaced with an m-dash. Again, very quick, and similar to Abi's
    treatment of dumb and smart quotes. With Abi, inserting a symbol takes many
    more steps. And, then, when I do insert the symbol, I get an m-dash in the
    Symbol font, while my document is in Times New Roman. At some time, through
    any type of formatting change, the Symbol fonted m-dash gets changed to
    Times New Roman and turns into a 3/4 symbol. I'll be filing bugs and/or
    RFE's with suggestions.

    Until then, I have found a workaround that works for me. As I type, I just
    insert "--" for my m-dashes. This keeps my typing fairly fast. When I'm
    done, I use Windows' character map to find the Times New Roman m-dash symbol
    [alt-151]. I insert that symbol into Abi's search/replace dialog box and it
    replaces all of my --'s into m-dashes.

    Virgil

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