Why is Autocorrect so limited?

[nsivin]

I use the Autocorrect facility intensively to make shortcuts, e.g., ;la for “Latin-American.” It works quite well, except that when I type a double or single quote, a close parenthesis, or a dash after the abbreviation, it doesn’t expand. It also doesn’t expand if the first letter is capitalized. I suspect these are just omissions rather than bugs, but in either case it is a pain in the neck. For the first problem, expansion should work for all punctuation; for the second, I suggest you offer an option for instances in which the user doesn’t want the expansion to work when initial caps is on, and make the default that it always works.

I am using the latest Writer under AMD 64-bit Linux Mint 17 on a PC.

[ROSt53]

Can you please give some examples?

[mariosv]

Why Why Why, perhaps is so limited waiting for enhancements, Get involved.
Maybe a deep read of help and documentation, can solve some issues. LibreOffice documentation.

1. Some characters has an special meaning because they are part of regular expression what can be used in Replace. Sometimes not everything fits. (In Menu/Tools/Autorrect - Replace click the help button.)

2. Quotes have their own replacement in Menu/Tools/Autocorrect - Localized options, uncheck and maybe can work.

[oweng]

Wildcard AutoCorrection as implemented recently (fdo#55292) and coming in v4.4 will hopefully solve the problem of pattern matching adjacent to punctuation, such as a quotation mark or parenthesis. The capitalisation issue is likely a separate issue. A pattern must be matched exactly (and not conflict with other patterns / AutoCorrect entries as @mariosv indicates), otherwise it will not be effective. It may be necessary to turn off one or more of the AutoCorrect options.