Subject: Re: Commit: A boat load of things
From: WJCarpenter (bill-abisource@carpenter.ORG)
Date: Tue Mar 06 2001 - 15:34:36 CST
sam> Ignore should *never* *ever* result in squiggles. Ignore means "I
sam> do not want the spell checker looking at this word again."
I agree that that's a good semantic intention for "Ignore", though I'd
tweak it to be "looking at this instance of this word again".
However, we don't have an implementation that does that. (Neither
does MSWord, I think.)
If you wanted that, you'd have to have a way to mark a particular word
in context as "don't spell-check me". Other instances of the word
still need spell-checking, so just keeping a list isn't a good
approach. (Keeping a list with positions seems unworkable since the
position of a word can slide around quite a bit.)
If someone pointed and said, "make it so", one approach would be to
make "ignore spell-check" an attribute. Yeah, yeah, attributes are
about formatting or something, but it's only a civil offense, not a
criminal one, to change that way of thinking. Having such an
attribute would mean:
1. Applying "ignore" to a word would have the effect of breaking up a
text run to put the ignored word into its own run, just like
making it bold or whatever. This machinery, including coalescing,
should work fine.
2. Saving the document would automatically persist that attribute,
which is pretty cool. Does anyone know of another WP that has
this feature (persistent ignore of word instances)?
3. If we had proper attribute inheritance, you could mark a word,
arbitrary selection, section, or document as "ignore
spell-check". That machinery would also make it painless for the
spell-checker to know if it was inside such a place.
4. It would make sense to have "Ignore" (and "unIgnore") on the
context menu.
5. Since the "ignored" state of a word/fragment/section/whatever is
invisible, we'd need some good GUI principles to keep the user
sane.
-- bill@carpenter.ORG (WJCarpenter) PGP 0x91865119 38 95 1B 69 C9 C6 3D 25 73 46 32 04 69 D6 ED F3
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