Suggestion for Title Exceptions - Proper Nouns

[garrettm30]

I think the Title Exceptions interface is pretty forward-thinking, but sadly it turns out to be a missed opportunity in some cases. Nearly all of my layout work is done in French, and modern French convention is to capitalize only the first word in a title plus any proper nouns; so basically, it is sentence case. Although Serif has thoughtfully provided the ability to put in different title exceptions per language, the French option is pretty well useless [following this standard: there are others, more complicated].

Let me suggest altering the existing paradigm very slightly in a way that I think will not break the existing user settings and would be a boon even for languages like English. I suggest that both Title Case and Sentence Case consider this list of exceptions (and possibly Lower Case), and any entries in the list will be capitalized or not according to how they are entered in the list.

The most frequent case-changing scenario I encounter is to fix strings of text that were entered with all caps. I typically chose either Lower Case or Sentence Case, and then about 40% of the time I need to go back and capitalize the proper nouns. In some fields (religion is mine), there are certain proper nouns that appear with great frequency. If I could enter these most frequently used proper nouns into the list, I am sure I could reduce the frequency of touching up the capitalization by at least half.

Let me illustrate, and in English for the sake of the forum. Let's say I have this string of text, foolishly "formatted" by the author using the caps lock key:

THE EXHAUSTIVE CONCORDANCE TO THE GREEK NEW TESTAMENT

Now let's say in my Title Exceptions for Publisher 1.7.3, I already have the common prepositions and articles that one would not normally capitalize in title case in English:

• a
• for
• an
• the
• of
• to
• [etc.]

Now let's say a future update to Publisher implements my suggestion. Now I could add to that list any proper nouns as I wish, observing the appropriate capitalisation in each case:

• Greek
• New Testament
• iPhone
• [etc.]

(Notice the two words as a single entry, because "new" and "testament" are not themselves proper nouns, but together "New Testament" is.)

Now let's say I run Title Case on my example above using this list of exceptions. It first capitalizes the first word regardless (as it does now). Then, when it finds a hit (the words "to," "the," "Greek" and "New Testament"), it would capitalize them as they appear in the list. Thus we would get the properly capitalized English title: The Exhaustive Concordance to the Greek New Testament.

Similarly, Sentence Case would capitalize the first word, but none other unless it is a word in the list, in which case again it would be capitalized as it appears in the list. So: The exhaustive concordance to the Greek New Testament.

Note that this system would even handle non-standard proper nouns like iPhone:

Title Case: The iPhone for Dummies
Sentence Case: The iPhone for dummies.