There is no central way to do it in all applications, no. In fact, most do
not support a way to do it per application. :-(
It gets better or worse in Windows 2000 (depending on your point of view) as
it grabs whole clusters when you work per letter, thus Tamil TTA + I and
other ligatures are selected as a unit. Probably worse in your case, since
you may sometimes want to select single letters. :-)
FWIW, in Word, WordPad, OE, and Outlook, I am more of a keyboard person,
especially for selections (sometimes an occupational hazard of development?
<g>). It will respect your starting place if you hold down the shift key as
you arrow around or use home/end or the arrows, and does not do the "word
selection" that you are talking about.
michka
a new book on internationalization in VB at
http://www.i18nWithVB.com/
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark Davis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Unicode List" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Monday, October 02, 2000 10:00 AM
Subject: [OT] Word select in Microsoft products?
[Off topic -- just looking for information from a broad audience.]
Anyone know how to turn off the extremely annoying automatic word select
(AWS) in Microsoft products? This is the "feature" that causes dragging
outside of a word to behave like double-click. I often want to select part
of a word, such when editing at the start of a sentence. For example, in the
sentence
Only the finest products...
to remove the word "Only" I would click after the first "t", then drag back
to include "Only t", then type a T. I have been doing this for years; to
select words you just double-click.
In Word and PowerPoint, I can turn off AWS with Tools > Options > Edit >
"When selecting, automatically select entire word".
Excel, FrontPage, Access, Notepad, the desktop (e.g. in filenames), and the
vast majority of non-Microsoft products do the right thing WITHOUT setting
an option.
What I can't do is figure out how to turn off AWS in Internet Explorer,
Outlook Express, Outlook, or WordPad. These products are also -- of
course -- very inconsistent. When selecting characters in the main window,
IE does do AWS. But not in the Address bar, dialog boxes, file selection,
etc. Anyone have an idea?