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Re: [StrongED] Re: Manual - Shortcuts
On 2018-06-29 14:13, Richard Torrens (lists) wrote:
The StrongHelp says
"The shortcut is 'free' when the letters that are before and after it
in
the text, are of a different type than the first and last letter of the
shortcut (or something like that..)"
So it is down to exactly what the (or something like that..) means...
Yes, and also what exactly is meant by "the letters that are before and
after it". I think this is impossible to describe without showing what
a piece of text looks like as someone starts to type a shortcut. As you
point out, in some documents there won't be anything after what one is
typing. And, if one types a shortcut at the start of a line, or at any
rate preceded only by whitespace, do characters (letters?) on a previous
line matter at all?
Are all these letters that are being talked about definitely letters?
It's ambiguous to talk about content of "the shortcut" - it's entirely
unclear whether it's the contents of the typed_text, or the contents of
the replacement_text that matter, or possibly the characters of the
text originally surrounding the typed_text.
If you are typing a new dcument there is an implicit "end of" as there
is
nothing after the bit you type... I called that a CR to simplify it!
Then you complicated it.
If you type ``1 followed by This is a heading
then there's "nothing after the bit you type" after eg "Thi" until you
type an "s". Then there's nothing after that until you type a space,
and so on. SE must be waiting for some indication that the end of the
phrase has come.
If it's not using a trigger character the only other option is that it
waits until there's been no typing for some length of time.
but ``1 expands if there are spaces or a TAB following as that is
different.
So I have changed the CR for "white space"
Explanations can get too complicated. Only Fred could define what
"Different" means and I don't think that would be exactly simple...
There's no point in 'explaining' something complicated unless you can
unambiguously show readers what you mean. If it can't be explained
in one or two sentences because it's "too difficult", then it
absolutely needs an explanation done in a way that isn't difficult.
I think you might need a simple example, then perhaps the ambiguous
description (hopefully made non-ambiguous though) then a worked
example that shows which characters were the the significant ones.
--
Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own
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