Caps & Slides -- Midnight suggestion

Posted by Jean Ichbiah ® , Fri, Feb 07, 2003, 18:40:24   Forum
We are at rc1 and it feels like five minutes before midnight and therefore late for a last minute suggestion :) And yet:

Consider what we do currently for Caps and Slides. Take the example we used when introducing custom slides in Version 2. A German user defines the following West slides that correspond to frequent letter sequences:

s    sch
S    Sch
Currently, sliding s will give sch but how do we get the second one? To get the capitalized one, you have to tap on the Shift key and then slide s.

There is an alternate semantics we could define: We could consider that if we do a long slide, the slide for the capital variation applies if there is one. Look at the effect:

Currently, the system has the advantage that if you want a capital, you are guaranteed to get it by a long slide in any direction. With this change you would have to be a little more cautious for the vowels, as they have accented variations defined as default slides.

For example, consider the effect of a North long slide of a in the current and the alternate semantics:

Current: A
Alternate: Ä
For most vowels you could be guaranteed to get the capital letter by doing a South long slide since none of the South slides has a predefined accented value. On the other hand, this does not work for the letter u (too close to the bottom) and you would have to use a long West slide to get U.

Jean Ichbiah

PS. The change is big semantically but very small for the implementation.

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