[Libreoffice-ux-advise] [Bug 148189] Autocorrect hyphen/minus sign into Hebrew Maqaf when appropriate

[bugzilla-daemon at bugs.documentfoundation.org]

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=148189

--- Comment #7 from Shai Berger <shai at platonix.com> ---
Hi, 

I want to support Eyal's suggestion here. Some background: I was involved with
the Hebrew keyboard layout standardization effort which led to the inclusion of
Maqaf in the layout; in fact, I authored that part of the "il" XKB symbols
file.  AFAIK, the alt+- key combination produces a Maqaf on Windows too, since
Windows 10.

I think the suggestion to use an emoji-like construct (":+-:"), is missing the
point: Because of decades of this character not being available on keyboards;
and the fact that it's a 3rd-level key, meaning it is still not engraved on
most physical keyboards, people have been taught not look out for it. However,
since it is still used in newspapers and books, its use will make texts look
better, and people will be happy to see it offered to them.

I think it is comparable, culturally and technically, to the fixing of ordinal
numbers (where 4th is changed to 4^th):
- It is something which makes text look much nicer; most users would just not
bother to find the option to do it themselves, but would be happy to see the
computer do it for them;
- There are contextual constraints on the transformations -- th is transformed
in "4th" and "1234th", but not in "a4th" (not pure number before) nor "4thd"
(not end-of-word after). 

Considering your question if this belongs in localized options -- I'm not sure.
The number suffixes are localized, as they change from language to language.
"Capitalize first letter of every sentence" isn't, as it is apparently relevant
to all users of Latin, Greek and and Cyrillic scripts. I think this feature is
closer to the latter -- relevant to all users of the Hebrew script (the two
most significant languages are Hebrew and Yiddish, you can see some uses in
Yiddish at https://yi.wikipedia.org/), but I'll accept the argument that the
whole script is fringe enough to put the option in "localized".

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