I plan to add support for the Word Services Suite to abiword's MacOS and
BeOS versions.
That allows you to drop a variety of text services such as spellchecking
into the menu. It can also be used for other operations on text such as
encryption (more useful for email), word counting, HTML verification and the
like.
Unfortunately Word Services is built on top of proprietary OS-specific
scripting API's. On MacOS it uses the Apple Object Model and Apple Events.
On BeOS it uses the BeOS scripting conventions and BMessages. So Word
Services won't be able to work on XWindows, unless there is some kind of
accepted standard for communicating with an application about document
content in a structural form on X11.
With Apple Events or the BeOS, I can ask a word processor a question like
"can I have the text of the first 3 paragraphs in the document named 'foo'?"
Once you can do something like that, the implementation of Word Services is
very simple, requiring just a couple hours to integrate the sample code.
You can find out more about it at http://www.wordservices.org
-- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com crawford@goingware.comGeometric Visions - the Art and Music of Michael David Crawford http://www.geometricvisions.com michael@geometricvisions.com
Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow