Re: desktop-devel-list digest, Vol 1 #666 - 7 msgs

[Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com>]

Paolo wrote:

> Hi Martin, Radek,
> 
> I'm working on a spell checker solution for gedit
> (http://www.gnome.org/~paolo/screenshots/spell-checker.png) to be
> included in the GNOME 2.2 releases.
> 
> Speaking on IRC with the GNOME release team, they suggested me to
> contact you in order to try to join our efforts and propose a generic
> spell checking solution for GNOME (to be included in libegg).
> According to them (and me), it should be a gtk+/glib/gobject only
> solution.

I wish I had known about this effort... since I believe I have a much
more powerful solution.  It is not gtk+-glib-only, however; but it can
be run with any pre-existing GNOME-2 application that has editable text
fields...

It does not require plugin technology or any explicity collaboration
from the application whose data is being spellchecked, but relies on the
accessibility APIs instead.

Even if you feel that the checker must be gtk+-only (without GNOME
libraries), why not use ATK to obtain and manipulate the text?

-Bill

> You can see my current code (partially unfinished) in gedit/plugin/spell
> (CVS HEAD).
> 
> I have developed a spell checker class (whose API is quite similar to
> the gnome-spell interface) called gedit-spell-checker and a generic
> spell checker dialog called gedit-spell-checker-dialog.
> 
> ATM, my solution is based on pspell .12.2 but I think we should base it
> on the new GNU aspell (the new API supports filters and let you manage
> the personal dictionary too).
> 
> I am looking forward to hearing from you.
> 
> Ciao,
> Paolo
> 
> P.S. I'm planning to patch gtkspell in order to use my spell checker
> class.