Re: spell checking

[Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com>]

(oops, did I screw up the Subject: line again ?)

On Fri, 2002-09-13 at 17:53, Jody Goldberg wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 13, 2002 at 05:39:16PM +0100, Bill Haneman wrote:
> > 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...
> 
> Using atk would be interesting, and would provide incentive to
> implement the interfaces.  However, it only solves part of the
> problem.  Management of the dictionary and dialogs to handle the
> corections are where the majority of the work is going to go. 

Agreed, this is the interesting stuff; but the back-end is interesting
also (as is the means of invocation).  My point is that this would allow
checking of things that "didn't" know the invocation API, didn't support
plugins, etc. in addition to things that explicitly asked for
spell-checking services.

While we're on the topic, a very interesting and (in future) important
role for a "spell checker" would be language tagging, which is a fairly
straightforward extension of the "interactive spell checker" concept,
but with multiple dictionaries.  Language tagging is important but a
real PITA, something like this could make the task a lot easier.

> It
> may be a touch premature to base the spell checking on editable
> fields.  There are alot of things that could use spell checking that
> don't have an editable field to edit.

Sure, I didn't mean that *checking* would be restricted to "editable
text" (e.g. AtkEditableText) fields, only that *correction* would be
limited to editable fields.  You could "check" anything with text
content using ATK and/or at-spi, even labels and buttons ;-).

regards,

-Bill

> eg
>     spell checking a region in a spreadsheet.  There
>     is no single field to check.

Yep, that too :-)