Character or paragraph style to display everything in minuscules

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Ez3

Hello. I'm not a new user but I also haven't yet used Scribus "in anger".

I'd like to have the freedom to easily switch between:
  • ALL CAPS (already there)
  • Capitalize The First Letter Of Each Word
  • Only the first letter of the first word is capitalized
  • all words in minuscules. ever

As a matter of fact, I only need the last style with all words in minuscule to style some marginal titles, independently of how the text is stored. E.g. I'd like to be able to write:
"Work Experience" as in a heading, and then be able to switch between those styles, in a similar fashion to what the CSS text-transform property achieves.

Should I request the feature? Could it be done with a script in the meantime?

Thanks

utnik

hi ez3

i think this is a job for a script.
you can always file a feature request, but this one won't have many use cases – not sure if the devs will spend a lot of work for it...

utnik

a.l.e

without having had a look at the code, i would say that all small caps should be easy to implement, since we already have all caps in the code, it's probably just the inverted transformation.
it's just as likely that it's of little interest in the real world: even our all small caps support team will probably not use it much in scribus...
(all caps is ugly, but very common in some languages: that's why it's already in!)

sentence case (or whatever is called the first letter in the sentence in caps) should also be rather easy to add (once it's clear in which language which letter starts a sentence).
if you only want to control the first letter of the sentence.
probably, also of limited interest in the real world.
the inverted case (unsentence case... with the first letter in the sentence lowercase) is probably just as useful, but harder to implement (due those stupid words that need to be written with one or more uppercase... there are also a few words that require lowercase (mm, some people's name, ...) but those are unlikely to be at the start of a sentence)

title case would be very useful (headings at levels lower than 2 should be in title case in the body of the text, but in sentence case in the table of contents).
sadly, the rules for deciding which words should start in upper case are not trivial and depend on the language.
english is the language that most would need it, but also has non trivial rules for deciding which word will be left in lowercase (and, or, the, ...).

all this having been said:

this is a case where the community can contribute the biggest part of the feature and help the developers implement the feature by collecting for each transformation (and for multiple languages):

  • the rules,
  • exhaustive examples, and
  • links to style guides.

the specification and implementation of the css property text-transform can be of much help in defining the rules for scribus (and is freely available).

my conclusion:

  • adding only one of the transformations is probably of little interest (except for title caps, the most complex of them).
  • people with typography skills (but no programming skills) can help substantially for this feature (without even needing much coordination)
  • in the meantime the rules specified in here can easily be implemented in a set of scripts

Ez3

I agree. There are more important and urgent things.

I'll start tinkering with scripts.