Ios predictive text in messaging update#

Include just one smart/curly quote, and you only get 70 characters. In short: if you stick to dumb quotes, you can put 160 characters in an SMS message. Include even just a single non-ASCII character, though - such as a curly quote or apostrophe, or an emoji - and the entire message must be encoded using a 16-bit alphabet, limiting the message to just 70 characters because the length of the message in bytes remains fixed by the protocol. An SMS message containing only ASCII characters can contain up to 160 characters. SMS is such an old standard that it was designed with the ASCII character set in mind.

Here’s a thread on Apple’s help forum addressing the issue. Why? My best guess: unintended consequences when sending SMS messages.

Ios predictive text in messaging update#

In some recent update to iOS (I think 11.2.5, but it might have been an earlier 11.2.x update), smart punctuation stopped working in Messages - and as far as I can tell, only Messages. I can say it’s not a difficult programming job to solve because I’ve solved it in the more difficult context of smartening punctuation in prose without messing up the necessary dumb quotes inside HTML tags. I say “finally” because MacOS has had the feature in the standard text editing system for many years, and I can’t think of a good reason why it wasn’t in iOS years ago.

When enabled, quotes and apostrophes (like 'this' and 'this') are automatically turned into their proper counterparts (like “this” and ‘this’), two hyphens in a row (-) are turned into a proper em-dash (-), etc. You can turn this on in Settings → General → Keyboards. IOS 11 finally added a long-awaited feature for those of us who care about typographic details: smart punctuation. IOS Messages and Smart Punctuation Tuesday, 20 February 2018