by Mike Evans, 17 August 2012
Life is made up of little victories. Solving a nagging computer problem can be one of them, as I found this week. Since I updated Macilos to Squarespace 6 from the tried-and-trusted Squarespace 5, I’ve been plagued by an annoying little bug in the web-based text editor. Whenever I tried to insert a word into an existing draft this word would be capitalised.
My friend Austin White of Thoughtfuldesign.net has had exactly the same problem and we had both put in tickets to Squarespace.
As a result I have had a protracted correspondence with the helpful Squarespace staff and we couldn’t resolve the problem. This morning I was answering yet another email on the subject when I mentioned that the capitalisation reminded me of TextExpander working to correct a mistyped word or expanding an abbreviation. Suddenly I had inspiration: TextExpander–maybe this has something to do with it?
I discovered that in TextExpander settings I had turned on auto capitalisation for the start of a sentence. Normally, and in all other applications, including web-based documents, this works as advertised. Start a sentence with a lowercase letter and TE will substitute an initial capital. Insert a word and TextExpander recognises that this is not the start of a sentence and therefore leaves the initial in lower case.
In the Squarespace editor, however, this is not the case. Somehow it is signalling TextExpander that the inserted word is, indeed, the start of a sentence. The immediate solution is to turn off auto capitalisation for Safari. Now the inserted words are left to their own devices but I have lost the ability to have TE capitalise the first letter of a sentence.
It’s gratifying to get to the bottom of this, if only part way. Yet the question still remains. Why does TextExpander think that an inserted word, but only in the Squarespace editor, is the start of a new sentence?
I am still working with Squarespace support on the issue and it remains to be seen whether it is a bug in their editor or something to do with Text Expander. I will report further when I get the answer.