This concerns mostly the QA and distribution chain, but it has implications for the linguistic components as well. As designers of spell checkers and other language tools, we need to see the whole environment in which they operate.
In December a new Swedish dictionary was produced and ready for inclusion in OOo. After much waiting, possibly misunderstandings, and reminders, it has now been scheduled (by "mh" [1]) for inclusion in OOo 2.3. There are no licensing problems. The only problem is that the previous Swedish dictionary (from 2003, actually very close to the Swedish ispell dictionary from 1997) is very poor, so the update is much needed. In the timespan from December both version 2.1 and 2.2 of OOo have been missed. Can we now be sure that 2.3 will come out with the new dictionary? Can something go wrong, that delays this improvement further? How can we improve this release process so that future updates of the dictionary is handled faster? Is there still a chance to have the new dictionary included already in version 2.2? For users of operating systems with automatic updates (e.g. Ubuntu Linux), is there any way that OOo can give priority to such updates? Right now I have no idea how the OOo-Ubuntu connection works. My own standard Ubuntu installation still offers OOo 2.0.4 and I have no clue when they are going to offer 2.1. When I'm lost in the dark without information, I take pleasure in conspiracy theories. This time I added a note to the bugzilla that Sun Sweden has an interest in delaying the improvement of OpenOffice. This is of course mere speculation, for which I have no proof. It is however a fact that they market StarOffice in Swedish with the argument [2] that it has a professional grade spell checker, which OpenOffice so far hasn't had. And it is a fact that this issue [1] was finally pushed forward only after my mentioning of Scott McNealy's name. (That's a useful name.) [1] http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=62268 [2] http://se.sun.com/press/feature_stories/2005/051004/sida2.html In the future, I think we need to push out new dictionaries more often, e.g. including new names from politics, news and media. If there is going to be a 3 month delay for every update, perhaps the spell checker should be redesigned so that it doesn't only rely on the dictionary in the distribution, but also checks a live server for today's updates. Such updates could even be built as a subscription service. It might also become important that other softwares (e.g. the Firefox browser) use the same spell checker and that they use a common spell checking daemon on the local computer. The above should also apply to thesauri and grammar checkers. -- Lars Aronsson ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
