Convert from upper to title case

[Weatherlawyer]

I went into format to convert a NWS storm bulletin to title case from their bloody awful shouting.
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/text/refresh/MI ... 0829.shtml

Sample:

WTPZ32 KNHC 270829
TCPEP2
BULLETIN
TROPICAL DEPRESSION TWO-E ADVISORY NUMBER 1
NWS TPC/NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER MIAMI FL EP022008
200 AM PDT FRI JUN 27 2008

All the "Format > Change Case" drop down offers is from upper to lower or the other way around. Why?

So I changed the case to lower and then wondered if I could find the answer. I went back in the "Format" drop down menu, then > Character > Font Effects > Effects and changed the effect to "Title".

That dis it. Loverly!

Only when I copied the now capitalised first letter in each sentence cased message, I got this:

wtpz32 knhc 270829
tcpep2
bulletin
tropical depression two-e advisory number 1
nws tpc/national hurricane center miami fl ep022008
200 am pdt fri jun 27 2008

Which isn't a great deal of use is it?

[Weatherlawyer]

Good grief!

The only post on this subject in the search is my own.

/Good grief!

[Hagar Delest]

Here is my search: 'capitalize first letter' keywords.

[Weatherlawyer]

Here is my search: 'capitalize first letter' keywords.

Have we got an icon for me spitting out my dummy again?

Sorry about that. It is a major frustration to a SBraiNoP (small brain no patience) though.

[Hagar Delest]

In fact, after searching a lot to find relevant threads for new questions, I'm rather used to the right keywords now. Moreover, as my Firefox remembers the strings I use, I often already have those who got me the threads. Moreover, the default display for results is 'by posts' and it's just a bad choice. It should be 'by topics' to see the solved threads and to reduce the hits to a single page instead of 30 pages of posts. We are working on it.

Back to your issue, I've not really found any workaround. It seems that you need to actually change the character (its encoding). Any uppercase format is an additional layer that doesn't change the character in itself.

I've managed to get what you want with regular expressions however. But if you copy/paste again elsewhere, you lose the capitalization.
1. Change line feeds to paragraph breaks
Regular expressions option checked in the More options dialog of Find and Replace.
Search for: \n
Replace by: \n

2. Capitalize first letter of each paragraph:
Search for: ^.
Replace by: & with Format>Uppercase.

[TheGurkha]

See my post in this thread, it contains a macro and links that explain how to assign it to a menu and/or a key combination. I use Shift-F3. The capitalization persists across cut and paste too.

Note that this macro doesn't cycle through the lowercase, uppercase, title case sequence that other macros do, all it does is force things to title case. I use teh Format menu Change Case options to go to lower or upper.

[Issue] Uppercase to lowercase with capital letter

[Weatherlawyer]

Thanks.

I suppose I'll have to try and get my head around macros. I am not looking forward to it. I suppose it would be too much to ask for a version that incorporates what is a basic need that should have been available in OOo 1.0 but isn't.

I can not, for the life of me, comprehend why not, or what oafish thinking came up with the Format > Character > Effect commands that only have a superficial effect. What was that about?

WTF was it about????

[Andrew P.]

The Format > Character > Font Effects trick isn't "real". For example, select a sentence where only the first character is capitalized. Apply the "Title" effect to the string. On your screen you will see that the first character of every word in the string is now capitalized. Copy the string to the clipboard, then paste it elsewhere into your document as Unformatted Text. You'll see that the Title Case capitalization isn't present, showing only the original Sentence case.

There is a downloadable archive, ChCase-1.0.zip, assembled by Erik Østergaard and based on work by one or more previous authors. Unfortunately, by adding Danish language options and lots of redundant comments, the Basic code module has become so bloated that it can't run under OpenOffice.org 2.4.1, and when I tried to cut-and-paste the module into the OpenOffice.org Basic editor, the editor truncated the code and displayed an error message. (The ChCase.bas file is about 65 kbytes in size.) By cutting out the redundant comments, stripping out the leading whitespace in the file and deleting code that is only of interest to Danish users, I was able to pare the code down to a point where I could test it in OpenOffice Writer. Unfortunately, the code has lots of frills of dubious value, such as "random case", but doesn't cover the basic change-case functions offered by Microsoft Word: "Sentence case.", "tOGGLE cASE", and "Title Case".

What OpenOffice needs is a real set of macros, assigned to the Change Case submenu under the Format menu, much as the way Microsoft Word has been doing it since Microsoft Office 95. (I still actively use Windows 98SE on some of my machines, so I'm stuck with OpenOffice 2.4.1, since OpenOffice 3.x no longer installs on Windows 98. I'll eventually get around to installing OpenOffice 3.x on my Linux machine, but I already know that the meager support for change-case functions persists in the latest version.)

[floris v]

I can not, for the life of me, comprehend why not, or what oafish thinking came up with the Format > Character > Effect commands that only have a superficial effect. What was that about?

While that looks really dumb at first, it really makes sense. Imagine that you have a heading text like "Obama asks Clinton for secretary of state". If you start with that text in the correct capitalisation and then decide to change to title case or all caps, you'd be in trouble if you 'd later want to revert, because there's no way that you can expect OOo to respect the C in Clinton. For that reason the original capitalisation is preserved.

[ihaveanewname]

you can use titlecase.com for this with no problem, it's free

[JKatz]

This *still* hasn't been fixed! The superficial caps conversion is a real nuisance. I've worked around it by printing the page to pdf and copying the "caps" text portion into the clipboard from there. It works, but what a pain! Please fix this!!!

[Hagar Delest]

If you read the explanation from floris v, this is more a feature than a bug.
Preserving the original case should be the default.
If you need a more advanced feature then write a macro for that.