ClipTools: Headline Case and Capitalization

If you need to capitalize words for titles or headlines, there is a special customizable feature in ClipTools that will let you capitalize words based on your own rules. You can also change the case, capitalize or even make text appear upside down.
Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to use Headline Case and other capitalization tools in ClipTools
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ClipTools is my free app that you can get here in the Mac App Store. Once you install it and run it you should see it here in the Mac MENU BAR. Now some of the tools don't necessarily involve copying and pasting. They do involve the selection of text, whether it is in TextEdit, Mail, Pages, or whatever. So you can select text like this and then you can perform actions on that selection. 
If you look down under Change Selection Case you have a variety of tools here. Now the first two are fairly simple and something you could already do in macOS in the Edit Menu. But I included them anyway just to have a complete set of tools. So you can change the selected text to all uppercase like that. Or you can change the selected case to all lower case. Handy for when you accidentally type something using the Caps Lock Key and don't realize it until it is too late. 
Now, after that, you've got the ability to Capitalize All Words. So when you use this every single word gets capitalized including ones that you may not want capitalized. Like the word The here. This is similar to using Edit and then Transformations and then Capitalize. Both can be useful to quickly transform text for a Headline and then you just have to go through and lower case a few things like this. But I included a few other variations as well. For instance, you've got Capitalize Sentences. So let's turn this into a sentence and it is all lower case now. I'm going to create a few copies of it like that. If I select all of that and then use Change Selection Case, Capitalize Sentences notice that the first letter of every sentence has been capitalized. The rest has been left as before. 
On the other hand if you go to Change Selection Case and then Capitalize Lines it will just capitalize the first letter of every line or usually you call it a paragraph. So you can see the beginnings of sentences are unchanged. It's just the first character in every line or paragraph of whatever text you have selected. 
Now capitalize sentences and capitalize lines will not interfere with the existing capital letters. So I have a capital letter here in this example and if I go and Change Selection Case and say Capitalize Sentences you can see it does capitalize the sentence but it doesn't make everything else lower case. 
So now the whole point of Change Selection Case is this one command here which I built basically for myself. Headline Case. So often when you capitalize things in a sentence you're doing it to create a headline, a title on top of a newsletter or a blog post or whatever. You want to have most words capitalized but not all and you want to follow certain rules. So I've created Headline Case here and if you use that notice that a capitalizes everything here but didn't capitalize the word the. In addition, if I were to type a word like this, where there is unusual capitalization, lowercase first letter and a capital second letter and I were to use Change Selection Case, Headline Case notice how it doesn't change this. The idea behind Headline Case is to follow a certain style guide that you may have for headlines. It may say things like don't capitalize the word the unless it is the first word of the sentence. But do treat words like iPhone and macOS as they are supposed to be written out. Don't capitalize the first letter of those words. 
So the question is, how does it know what your style guide is? Well, that is left up to you. So if you go to Settings and you look at Headline Case Exception words there's a comma separated list here of words that will not be capitalized if they appear in the selected text. So you can see some basic things like, and, or, not, and so on. You can see somethings that have special capitalization like iPhone and MacMost. You can add whatever you want here! So, for instance, if you find you often using the word macOS, like that, you can add that. Now when you have a word like iPhone, where there is specific capital letters inside the word, that word will always be treated like that no matter where it is in the text, even if it is the first word. But if the word is all lower case letters like this then it will be used like it is spelled out here except if it is the first word in the text and then it will be capitalized. But if there is a word like this that is all lower case in the list then that will be capitalized if it is the first word in the sentence, otherwise it will appear exactly as it does right there. 
So when you have a sentence like this, even if you've incorrectly capitalized iPhone, like that, you can select it, you can go to Change Selection Case and Headline Case. Notice it does iPhone correctly there and notice the word for is lower case. Now here's where it gets tricky. Some style guides say that words like for and in sometimes are capitalized in headlines and sometimes are not. It depends on the grammar and use in the headline. Now Clip Tools isn't going to know this. So in some cases you're going to have to use headline text and then go and correct particular items like the word for and in and of. Just include them here if you find most of the time you want them lower case and then where there is an exception you can change it. Otherwise most of the time you want them capitalized then remove them from the here. You can add as many words as you want to this. Just keep adding new things to cover all the words that you commonly use for whatever topic you write about. 
Now I've made it super easy to access Headline Case with a keyboard shortcut. So the first thing you want to do is go into Settings and then set a Global Keyboard Shortcut. I've got Shift Command c set to activate Menu. So now once you've activated Menu notice that it is Shift Command h. So since both shortcuts use Shift and Command all you need to do is Shift Command c and then immediately hit h and you've got Headline Case.
So there are a few other things here that are in Change Selection Case that are kind of just for fun. There's Alternate Case. What happens here is every other letter is capitalized. Sometimes people like to use this in text messages or emails just to be more colorful or emphasize something. There's also Random Case which is similar but letters are capitalized randomly. Finally, there's Upside Down. What Upside Down does is it finds characters that kind of look like regular letters but upside down and reverses the text so it reads right to left. So it looks like you've flipped the text. The letters don't always perfectly match what was there before but they usually look pretty good. At least is it good enough to be able to read it and know what it says. So this is there really just for fun. People like to use this in text messages sometimes. 
So I hope you find Headline Case in Clip Tools and some of those other case changing functions useful. Thanks for watching.
ClipTools: Headline Case and Capitalization

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