Re: USAGE: Title Case [Was: USAGE: YAEUT: "proper"]

On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 12:29 PM, David McCann <david@...> wrote:
> "Nouns, adjectives, and verbs are usually given capitals;
... but forms of "to be" are often excepted from the "verb" category there...

> "… a more modern practice … is to apply the capitalisation of normal
> prose."
Sentence capitalization, mentioned in the article I linked, standard
in some international publications such as The Economist.

> Open Office does things like "The Cat In The Hat", so it's not just
> Micro$oft. It seems to be a computer thing.
Sure, because it's a lot easier - I'm tempted to say "at least
possible" - to write computer code that says "Hey, a space!  Make the
next letter uppercase!" than it is to write computer code that checks
a lexicon for part of speech information and an exceptions list, etc.
To properly automate capitalization, the code has to know what
language the text is in, since the rules different in different
languages.  And it's hard to do even just the simplest operation in
this realm, "make this letter uppercase". Again you need some sort of
language identity context, since e.g. an uppercase "i" is "I" in
English but "İ" in Turkish, plus some languages distinguish between
uppercase and titlecase for some letters...





--
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>

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