Betalogue on text replacement in Mail.app
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So when I discovered some strange behaviour in Mail.app that throws Spell Catcher X off balance, I blogged the solution that I found on Betalogue 
. (If you use Mail.app and Spell Catcher X you should know about this).
Now Pierre Igot at Betalogue has posted a longer interesting explanation of why this problem occurs.
In a nutshell, Mail.app doesn’t support the new-fangled direct replacement of text. It has to backspace character by character when Spell Catcher X makes a correction or expands the abbreviation for a text snippet.
That takes time. If you type quickly, you outstrip Spell Catcher X’s valiant attempts to cope with the backspacing.
A fast typist can achieve this on almost any Mac. Only with all the grunt of a Quad G5 beneath his finger tips has Pierre overcome it.
@agenda: Discuss new Mac with wife > @action: Learn to type more slowly.
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Tags: mail.app, Spell Catcher X, Textual chaos
February 1st, 2006 at 1:31 am
Just a clarification: the G5 Quad is the first machine on which I CANNOT reproduce the problem :). No matter how fast I type, the characters never get scrambled during a SCX shorthand expansion, even in Word 2004 or Mail.
February 1st, 2006 at 1:33 am
Sorry. My eyes were shrouded with a green cloud of envy and I didn’t pick that up ;-)
February 1st, 2006 at 12:52 pm
Actually, Pierre’s recent posting has nothing to do with Mail.app in particular. The actual cause of the problem he sometimes experiences while using Spell Catcher X is far, far more obscure than described, and the result quite a lot less catastrophic than “Textual chaos” (one character can appear out of order).
Basically, it can happen if you type a character during the few microseconds between the one that triggers an expansion, and when the first character of the expansion that Spell Catcher posts actually gets processed by the OS – but only (if I remember correctly) if you do this while another expansion is being performed.
A lot depends on the underlying app, and it occurs very rarely, and only with extremely fast typists that often type abbreviations while one is currently in-progress.
And (obviously), the faster the Mac, the fewer microseconds (nanoseconds?) the above-mentioned time interval would be…
February 8th, 2006 at 7:08 am
Evan: As far as I can tell, the problem doesn’t necessarily occur when using two abbreviations in a row. I have given you examples where it occurs after typing an abbreviation followed by a few “regular” words. If there is absolutely no delay between typing the abbrev and typing the rest, then if I type fast, there can be scrambled letters in the words following the abbrev.
But that’s all in the past for me now, as I cannot reproduce the problem with my G5 Quad :).
February 8th, 2006 at 1:01 pm
Yep, I just dug into this again because it’s being considered a big deal somehow on the various blogs pointing to yours (good luck to those trying to reproduce it – it ain’t easy).
It all came back to me – and you’re right, doesn’t have to be two abbreviations in a row. You have to have absolutely perfect timing – you have to type an abbreviation, then trigger it, then type another character while the expansion is occurring – THEN (by far that trickiest part) – type another character right after the last “buffered” character gets posted, and before it actually gets retrieved from the app’s event queue. I guess there’s a microsecond window of opportunity here, less on faster Macs.
It’s very very hard to reproduce with any sort of reliability (twice in a row? good luck!), and I’m trying to think of a way to at least mostly fix it without re-architecting all of the posting code…