Hi Just a quick note to say that I've added my graviax grammar checker (still very basic) to sourceforge <http://sourceforge.net/projects/graviax/>. I also want to add a few comments on the proposed OOo Grammar API (see below).
On 22 Jul 2005 at 12:05, Laurent Godard wrote: > Hi Daniel, > > i totally agree with most of your points > some remarks in addition > > > > > One problem is that you often don't know where a sentence starts and > > ends. Just looking for "." is not enough (e.g. because of > > abbreviations that end with a dot -- and these are different in all > > languages). So the API shouldn't know about sentences and needs to > > leave the sentence boundary detection to the grammar checker. > > > > I think this should be left to the grammar engine > The work unit that is passed to it should be the paragraph > This is IMHO the most well-defined (line break, paragraph break - > there is an OOo API for that - look at TextCursors) I just wanted to mention a few document-level checks that couldn't be performed if the checking is done paragraph by paragraph. I don't think any of them is all that important, but they are worth considering. 1. For a letter, checking that the opening (Dear Sir) and closing (Yours faithfully) match. 2. Checking consistency of capitalisation and punctuation in lists. 3. Consistency of terms throughout (for example choosing one of 'appendixes' or 'appendices' and using it exclusively). (Don't get the wrong idea -- my tool doesn't support any of these checks. In fact it currently works sentence by sentence, but would be easy enough to change. The point is that someone _might_ want to check things like those in the above list.) Perhaps the API should support both paragraph-level calls (for real- time checking) and document-at-once (for stand-alone one-off checks after a document has been written). One (sensible) way of working is to turn off real-time spelling and grammar checks so that they do not interrupt the flow of your writing, and then to check spelling and grammar at the end. Clearly, performance is less of a problem when doing this. Also, would it be possible to provide style information to the grammar checker (so it gets XML instead of plain text)? Users might want to set up rules that check, for example, that certain keywords are always bold or that latin terms appear in italics. This might also be necessary for checking things like the relative placement of footnote markers and quotation marks. Best wishes Matthew -- Matthew Strawbridge http://www.philoxenic.com Bespoke software development and freelance technical copy editing --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
