Subject: Re: Commit: A boat load of things
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Tue Mar 06 2001 - 16:11:37 CST
Bill,
The fact that you and I have the same instincts on this makes it sound like
a much better idea than I first thought. I'm sold.
At 01:34 PM 3/6/01 -0800, WJCarpenter wrote:
>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.
Great summary of the advantages (especially persistance) of using the props
mechanism for this. One addition -- this would also allow "ignore" to be
set as a style.
>4. It would make sense to have "Ignore" (and "unIgnore") on the
> context menu.
On the GUI issues -- is it ever useful to unignore only a single instance?
I think that the usual UI stance on this is to just blow 'em all away and do
a fresh spell-check pass.
Things that are always valid words (in this and other documents) belong in
your personal custom.dic anyhow. You only want to Ignore words that:
- that are only valid more locally (this instance or this file), and
- that you'd otherwise want caught and squiggled.
The main reason you'd want to unignore any of these is to double-check your
previous decision to ignore them. Making that a one-time bulk activity
sounds like an entirely appropriate solution.
bottom line
-----------
I'd be quite happy to see the following implementation:
- A document-level set of "ignore all" words.
- A character-level "ignore" property.
- A single button to unignore all of the above (in a document).
That'd be really, really cool and useful. I've actually missed this feature
while dogfooding recently.
>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.
Given the above proposal, this isn't much of an issue, since if you're ever
worried about it, you can just hit the button and recehck the document.
Thus, the only remaining GUI issue I'd have is whether the "recheck
document" button would override the ignore bit in style definitions. I
suspect that the correct answer is "no", which means that we'd need a way to
know that that style was being ignored.
Is something more visible than the upcoming styles dialog needed?
Paul
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