Subject: Re: commit: persistent ignored words
From: WJCarpenter (bill-abisource@carpenter.ORG)
Date: Tue Mar 27 2001 - 18:14:12 CST
paul> What are the semantics of these? Can they be used to implement
paul> the "flush" button I've mentioned previously (which empties the
paul> ignore list to allow those words to be rechecked)?
BTW, a feature I often wish for in spell checkers is more complicated
to develop ... selectively editing the ignored words list.
If you keep up the mythology that you're not going to open the *.abw
file with a text editor, then how do you know what words are on your
ignored words list? After you have just made a mistake and added a
true misspelling to your ignored words list, how do you take it back
off? It seems like quite a penalty that you have to throw away your
entire ingored words list and start over.
There are probably also legit use cases for wanting to pre-populate an
ignored words list, though they may be less compelling than the
selective removal cases.
The immediate solution that suggests itself is a dialog box that has a
list of the words in it, and that allows you to remove them, or move
them from the left half to the right half or whatever. This would be
quite workable, obviously, and would just have the usual cost of
per-platform dialog implementation.
A different approach would be to create an operation called "copy
ignored words list to clipboard", which would probably do something
simple like plain text, one word per line. From there, the user could
paste it into an AbiWord document and edit it using big, friendly
editing commands. (They could instead paste it into a text editor if
their heart desired.) A reverse operation called "create ignored
words list from clipboard" would fetch the clipboard and carve out all
the words and stuff them into the ignored words hash. Though it would
have to strip all formatting goop (which I think is easy on Windows
but maybe harder on some other platforms), it could accept a format
more liberal than one word per line. (A third operation, "merge
clipboard into ignored words list" could have some friendliness
value.)
Some warm, fuzzy stuff could be wrapped around the above if desired.
For example, hitting a button called "edit ignored words list" could
automatically open a new AbiWord document with some exciting special
name like " *Ingored Words List*" (heh, guess where that idea came
from), copy the ignored words list to the clipboard, and then paste
them into the newly opened document. When anyone tried to close or
save the document, the reverse operation would be performed ("save as"
would work normally).
Ditto, approximately, for editing the custom dictionary.
The disadvantages of this approach is that they are more of the flavor
of eating our own dogfood than previous UI mechanisms in AbiWord.
-- 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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