Hi everyone, since my colleagues and I started writing a plug-in for OpenOffice Writer I wanted to let you guys know what we're trying to achieve with it.
My company's main product is a client-server-based tool that assists authors in editing technical documentation. With a plug-in in their authoring tool, they can send the document they're currently working on to the server for linguistic analysis. Next to spell and grammar checking, this analysis involves checking of certain style rules (like "Don't use Future tense", "Don't use passive voice") and that the right terminology is used. Terminology is useful if you want to ensure that e.g. parts of a device are always called the same in a manual or that the right product name is used. The results of the analysis are then highlighted in the document itself so you don't have to jump between tools. The author can then click on each highlight and gets a context menu that offers more information about the issue and offers a suggestion how to correct it. After some great hints and some research we decided to use a smart tag-based approach to get the highlights for our flags into the document. For dummy texts, this works pretty well. Writing a plug-in for OpenOffice is pretty exciting for us since we have so far only dealt with proprietary editors with black box APIs. Sometimes we're lucky and grab a hold of a developer within the company that develops that editor and we get some information (usually just a confirmation that "this is indeed a bug"). With OpenOffice, this is a completely different story (finally!). If there's anything else you're interested in please drop me a line. Really looking forward to working with you guys! Best, Robert -- Robert Barbey Principal Software Engineer Integrations & UI robert.bar...@acrolinx.com Acrolinx GmbH Friedrichstraße 100 | 10117 Berlin | Germany http://www.acrolinx.com/
