On the BeOS version, and on the Mac version too, I plan to implement the Word
Services Suite, which allows any application to link to shared text services
like spellcheckers and grammar checkers.
Unfortunately that won't help for Windows and XWindows, because there's no
such standard defined for those platforms. On the Mac and BeOS, Word Services
is based on Apple Events and BMessages respectively, which are very platform
dependent.
I do know that WordPerfect was working on a "writing tools api" a few years
ago on Windows, and I had meetings with them to harmonize Word Services and
their API. I don't know if they ever brought it to market.
Is there any kind of document-content scripting standard for x windows? On
the BeOS and Mac, I can ask an application a question like "give me character
5 through 47 of paragraph 10 of the window named 'foo'". If there were
something like that for XWindows then I expect I could work to define a
version of Word Services that worked on Unix. The ability to work with
document structure like that is why I used OS-specific scripting API's rather
than something portable like TCP/IP.
It would be important that such a scripting api would be a cross-application
standard, and not specific to abiword, so it could be applied to other
applications.
To learn more about Word Services, see http://www.wordservices.org
The protocol spec and sample code are at
http://www.wordservices.org/Developers
Mike Crawford
crawford@goingware.com