From: Alan Horkan (horkana@maths.tcd.ie)
Date: Fri Sep 19 2003 - 14:48:51 EDT
I recently transcribed a fairly long article using Abiword 2.0 on windows
(a build from Jordi I think it was) which got me thinking ...
If a word is incorrectly spelled it should appear in the Change to: box,
selected and ready to be changed. The Change to box seems to be populated
based only on the suggestions, but if there are no suggestions it gets
left empty.
Spelling dialog a Cancel button, which is a bit odd as you cannot actually
Cancel the spelling changes, you can only Close the dialog when you are
done. I'd suggest keeping it simple and replacing Cancel with Close, as
opposed to worry about anything more complicated like 'Finished' or
'Done'.
I feel it might be generally useful if the spelling dialog was non-modal.
I only noticed that it was modal when trying to correct a fairly odd
typing error. I mistyped the word "influence" as "influenc eo",
but correcting using the spellchecker left me with an extra 'eo' stranded
but there is no convenient way to get rid of it, you would have to
close the dialog and delete it.
I guess this could be corrected by allowing the spellchecker to change
things to nothing, null, blank, thereby removing them. The "Change To:"
box in the spellchecking dialog expects at least one character, but I want
to get rid of the word. Presumably there is no reason why i shouldn't
provide a patch to remove this restriction (i did something similar for
Find and Replace, way back when).
The spell checker was quite dissapointing, I didn't realise quite how poor
ispell really was until now. I misspelt time as teim but time was nowhere
on the suggestions list. The spellchecker code needs to be smarter about
anagrams and juxtaposed characters. Suggestions for adn (and) and teh
(the) surprised me by being lower down the list of suggestions, with some
poor suggestions ahead of it. Maybe this is too far away from
spellchecking is more about correcting my typing errors than anything and
ispell is not abiwords fault. I am certainly looking forward to enchant
and being able to use myspell (and aspell?) which hopefully will be
better, or at least are actively developed and might listen to user
feedback.
I noticed changing document properties fails to mark the
document as dirty, but it seemed too familiar:
http://bugzilla.abisource.com/show_bug.cgi?id=5119
If you make a selection the characters jiggle around, it looks as if the
kerning might be being recalculated all the time but i assume this is part
of the big character handling problem holding back the 2.0 release for
windows.
I pasted a few times at the end of a document to generate a bunch of
nonsense text and then cut it. the redraw did not work properly, chunks
of the text were still shown. i notice that this does not happens if I
delete the whole paragraphy but only if i delete from the end to the
middle of a word. If anyone is interested I'll try and more rigorously
replicate and report the problem in bugzilla.
Please let me know if these are all windows specific problmes, and if
the changes I suggested to the spelling dialog would be appropriate.
Sincerely
Alan Horkan
http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/
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