Re: gtkspell (was Re: Announcing: Project Ridley)

[Martin Soto <soto informatik uni-kl de>]

On Sun, 2005-08-28 at 20:20 -0400, Rodney Dawes wrote:
> I would rather just see it work for all installed language dictionaries
> by default. There's no particular reason to make the user change their
> language in so many ways. For most users, I think this will work best.
> There might be some performance problems for people who install an
> extraneous amount of languages, but I don't think most people do that,
> and the performance issues probably wouldn't be that big of a deal
> anyway.

Unfortunately, the main problem is not performance, but the fact that
having many dictionaries active at the same time highly increases the
risk of false positives, thus beating the purpose of spell checking to
some extent. Similarities between languages actually make the situation
worse. For example it happens to me often when writing German that I
write "is" instead of the correct "ist", or even "here" instead of
"hier". Having both dictionaries active would fail to catch those pretty
common errors for me.

Like you, I consider simplicity very valuable, but I cannot think of a
solution that doesn't require the user to explicitly specify the
language in some way. The good part is that when only one dictionary is
installed, you could hide language selection completely. And people
actually having to deal with more than one language probably won't mind
the extra complexity, anyway.

Cheers,

M. S.