Betalogue

I’ve already described the problem with apostrophes in French and Word X’s text drag-and-drop feature.

This is just to note, first of all, that the problem is not fixed in Word 2004, and also that it also affects the “Paste” command, because the “Smart cut and paste” option (in “Preferences…“, under “Edit“) actually applies to both cut-and-paste operations and drag-and-drop operations.

Simply put, if you have a French word in the Clipboard and place your cursor after one of the French contracted forms that include an apostrophe (d’, l’, c’, etc.), even if your insertion point is exactly positioned right after the apostrophe, when pasting the word that’s in the Clipboard, Word will still add an extra space between the apostrophe and the pasted word, even though the context clearly dictates that it should not. (There is no context in French where the apostrophe is followed by a space.)

It’s dumb — and irritating.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Thursday, September 2nd, 2004 at 2:37 am and is filed under Macintosh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.