Re: Problems with the capitalization in Word Abbreviation Mode

[Andreas Politz]

Hans-Christian Mick wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm writing a paper in German and trying to automaticalliy fix some of
> my usual typos by using the Word Abbreviation mode (and I have to
> admit that I'm rather new to Emacs...).
>
> I'm having a problem with the capitalization in those abbreviations.
>
> A typo that happens to me rather often is that for example I'm typing
> "DAs" instead of "Das" at the beginning of a sentence.
> I have tried to define a global abbreviation for that, but now I'm
> getting every "das" in the middle of a sentence turned into "Das",
> which is not what I wanted of course.
>
> Looking into my abbrev.defs-file, I did not find the abbreviation
> "DAs" that I originally had defined, but only a lowercase "das" and I
> couldn't change it even by modifying the file directly (I wrote "DAs"
> into the file, but then it didn't work anymore at all).
>
> Seems as if I'm always getting a lowercase abbreviation, no matter how
> I'm defining my abbreviations.
>
> Could anyone please give me any hint on how to change this behaviour?
>
> Thanks a lot in advance!



I think that's just how abbrevs work. But `define-abbrev' permits a
function to handle abnormal expansions:

(defmacro define-literal-abbrev (table name expansion &optional count 
system-flag)
  `(define-abbrev ,table ,(downcase name) 'literal-abbrev
     (lambda ()
       (let (case-fold-search
             (start (- (point) ,(length name))))
         (when (looking-back (regexp-quote ,name) start)
           (delete-region start (point))
           (insert ,expansion))))
     ,count ,system-flag))

(define-literal-abbrev global-abbrev-table "DAs" "Das")

...and save the abbrev-table.

-ap