Bill Hibbert just sent an additional update about his macro for inserting accented characters in OpenOffice.org. Here it is!
I’ve made a small change to the macro and its documentation that I never bothered with before because I didn’t think anyone was interested.
There has been a known problem since the beginning with autocorrect of apostrophes. If this is switched on (in AutoCorrect>Custom Quotes, and also I think in AutoCorrect>Options>Replace standard quotes with custom quotes) then the autocorrect system gets to the apostrophe first, changes it, and so the macro can no longer find it in the conversion table eg to make an e acute. So it’s important that Custom Quotes should be switched off.
However, this removes easy access to opening and closing quotation marks, a real blow to the typographically fastidious amongst us, so I’ve added the four open/close single/double quotes to the beginning of the table, giving explicit control over the way apostrophes and quotation marks are used (which is really much better anyway, since OO isn’t as clever as it thinks it is). The new entries are:
‘ = single opening quote
‘/ = single closing quote
” = double opening quotes
“/ = double closing quotes
Of course for languages which use other characters (eg « and ») for quotations, different substitutions will apply (in this case the quotes are already in the table so my additions are redundant but harmless) and people will need to decide for themselves what changes, if any, they need to make.
I hope all this makes sense. It might be worth adding another post to your blog at some time pointing out this addition to people who’ve already downloaded it. They will probably find it easiest just to download the new macro, copy the first four entries in the table, then, editing their own table, paste them in at the beginning. This will keep intact any customisations they have made themselves. If they haven’t made any it’s probably easiest just to replace the whole macro.
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