Hi,
My 2 cents ...
I thought about interfacing to "system-level" spellcheckers and even
once wrote a daemon version of myspell to handle spellcheck requests
(ala Mac OSX spellcheck). The idea is a sound one since it will
allow the spellcheck daemon if it is smart to mmap the dictionary
data files allowing them to be in memory only once and shared across
numerous users (sort of like shared libraries, dlls are today).
One issue I ran into was that the OOo code at that time queried the
component that handled spellcheck and it was supposed to return a
list of iso language/country codes for all of the dictionaries it
knew about. The component itself had to find the dictionaries and
present a list somehow.
The problem was without a registration list of some sort many people
could not use one dictionary/thesaurus/hyphenation *cross-registered*
to their OOo language/region (which people did a lot since no UK/
English Thesaurus existed, etc). People also might want to add their
own personal dictionaries and/or special use dictionaries
(engineering, scientific/latin, mathematics etc) which might in fact
be common across multiple languages. How on earth would/should a
component know that the user wants to use the scientific dictionary
with his German document without some language code being involved
without some user controlled registration method.
So whatever interface to system-level spellcheckers OOo uses must
somehow allow the user to decide which languages used in OOo should
use which spell check dictionaries (the mapping is not one-to-one).
That was why I defaulted to a simple text list that allowed the user
or other integrated apps such as DicOOo to easily map dictionaries to
language codes if he/she wanted.
So simply saying use "system-level" spellcheckers is not enough.
AFAIK, Linux does not have a daemon-based system-level spellchecker
that understands anything about mmapping the data files so they are
shared, or any official port assignment, or any understanding of
language/country codes, any way for users to specify that a
dictionary should be used across multiple or specific languages, etc.
So there still is a need for DicOOo and they way OOo does
spellchecking. Just because some Linux distribution uses hunspell/
myspell/aspell/ispell etc and installs spellcheck dictionaries, does
not mean a "system-level" spellchecker really exists with any amount
of intelligence to it (forking a process and running the command line
version of each spellchecker does not count since parsing the
dictionary data files is the real cost). Simply sharing the
spellcheck dll is nothing in comparison to sharing the memory used by
the dictionaries and the need for user control.
Kevin (going back to lurking mode once again).
On Oct 2, 2007, at 1:24 PM, Mathias Bauer wrote:
Hi Laurent,
Laurent Godard wrote:
Yes we want to get rid off DicOOo
Yes it is old, crap and badly desgigned
(do not expect better for a basis coded in 2 days)
But, and it is a major BUT
I has been working for users for now 4 years
It is multiplatform, multilingual and users can use it and have their
dictionaries. The selfupdate mechanism has been implemented
because in
2003, the release cycle was around 1 year/1.5 year ...
If people are uncomfortable with it, hey recode it. But not only for
your own platform/distro, it has to suits all the plateform and more
important be user-friendly
For accepting macro message this is wrong as DicOOo is integrated
in the
File > Wizard menu and do not ask for any confirmation. It is
launched
as any other wizards
So people complain, i understand them
And as i already told to Mathias and Thomas, i'm ready to help to get
rid of DicOOo
But i won't drop DicOOo if i do not have a solution for basic end-
users
to get a dictionary installed easilly.
For other self-happy people giving lessons, please come and code
instead
of giving lengthy to-do-lists. Give a working solution that solve the
Dicooo problem and everybody will be happy
It sounds as you feel a little bit offended and perhaps rightly so.
So I want to say that I was thankful for having DicOOo as a stopgag
solution for an urgent user problem.
So if something was to blame here, it wouldn't be DicOOo.
I agree with you that complaining without actually doing something
is a
waste of time. That's the reason why I started thinking about ways to
solve the problem in the right[TM] way some time ago and - as you
wrote
- talked about that with you and others.
To my knowledge in 2003 the distributions haven't been ready for a
"system" spell checking idea and even today it will be a hard way to
move that forward. Reasons are e.g. the missing standardization on
pathes and spellcheckers and the different uses cases as mentioned by
Marcin, just to name a few.
But we are willing to get that going. So let's look forward and don't
bash a tool that was created in the good will to support users and
their
urgent problems because nobody else did it.
Today there is only one platform that has something that can be
called a
"system spell checker" and this is MacOS. And OOo will support it. I
hope that can be extended to free OS as well.
Ciao,
Mathias
--
Mathias Bauer (mba) - Project Lead OpenOffice.org Writer
OpenOffice.org Engineering at Sun: http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS
Please don't reply to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]".
I use it for the OOo lists and only rarely read other mails sent to
it.
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