RELEASE NOTES FOR SMARTCLIP This is a utility of the 'one dumb job' variety. It does one job, and does it fast and with minimal hoorah. What does it do? SmartClip a very small app that will do case conversion off of the clipboard and return the converted text to the clipboard. This gives you case conversion everywhere you can copy and paste. The conversions are very smart, using the same logic used by my Torquemada the Inquisitor. (For example, d”Œr’t•cˆls are handled correctly (e.g., Dë‚RêTìCËLS).) We don't clobber or (or anything within angle brackets). The software is also very careful in the vicinity of '@' signs, also to preserve Quark XPress tags. The case conversions are these: CONVERT TO ALL CAPS convert to all lower case Convert to sentence caps. Convert To Upstyle Caps Convert to Downstyle Caps Retain as plain text WHOA! Change nothing! The case conversions work as illustrated. Downstyle puts the first letter of 1-, 2- and 3-letter words in lower case, as is used in some headline styles. Sentence caps is pretty smart, but software is necessarily inherently easy to fool, and, in any case, none of the conversions take account of proper nouns. SmartClip will do 95% of your work, but there is no substitute of the intervention of an active human intelligence. "Retain as plain text" unstyles text copied from applications with their own internal clipboards. So, for example, you can copy styled text in Quark XPress or Adobe Illustrator, SmartClip it, then paste it elsewhere in the same document. When you do this, you will inherit the destination text region's styling, not the source text's styling (this is easier to do than to explain!). Selecting "WHOA! Change nothing!" then hitting "Okay" does the same thing as hitting "Cancel"--no change of any kind to the clipboard. It's there for hand-holding purposes, that's all. Tip: You should put a copy of SmartClip or an alias of it in your Apple menu for easy access. Quicker SmartClipping... Included in the archive is a set of QuickKeys shortcuts called "SmartClip Universal Shortcuts". These give you instant access to SmartClip from any application. To use these shortcuts, follow these steps: 1. Put a copy of SmartClip or an alias of it in your Apple menu. 2. Import the shortcuts into QuickKeys. Import into the "Universal" set, because you want case conversion to be available from any application or from the Finder. 3. Be sure to have text on the clipboard before you call one of the keys. Nothing bad will happen if you don't, of course. These are the Quickeys defined: CTRL-SHIFT-C CONVERT TO ALL CAPS CTRL-SHIFT-L convert to all lower case CTRL-SHIFT-S Convert to sentence caps. CTRL-SHIFT-U Convert To Upstyle Caps CTRL-SHIFT-D Convert to Downstyle Caps CTRL-SHIFT-P Retain as plain text The keys don't Paste or CMD-V at the end of the sequence, so it's up to you to do what you want after SmartClip and QuickKeys return you to your application. And, of course, in most cases you can Undo even after you Paste if you discover you've made a mistake. Notes for nerds... SmartClip is AppleEvent-aware, so you should be able to AppleScript to it, should you want to. I know nothing about this, so you're on your own, although the QuickKeys should provide a roadmap of how to do what you might want to do. About Greg Swann... The files "About Greg SwannÕs Utilities" and "About Greg SwannÕs Utils.HTML" provide volumes of information about me and my software, in plain text and in html with live links, respectively. The important information is this: If you need to contact me, I'm at: gswann@kagi.com or gswann@mailhost.primenet.com or Greg Swann 3608 West Cochise Drive Phoenix, AZ 85051 I'm in the process of updating everything I've ever written, but if you download something of mine, it could have any one of five mailing addresses. The Cochise Drive address above is the only one that will assuredly get to me. Of course, I much prefer email where email will suffice, and I've signed up as a kagi.com vendor, which should make everything easier. For now, if you want to see what else I've done, go to http://www.primenet.com/~gswann/software.html. Best, Greg Swann 8/1/98