Hello all, I'd like to look into this a bit more and see if it is possible (without sacrificing anything important) to use a dictionary as a word list.
Integrating a dictionary service into text views would be a good idea. I also would like to have a dictionary as a panel which shows the definition (assuming there is one) of whatever word is under the current selection. Yen-Ju Chen wrote: > On 6/7/07, Isaiah Beerbower <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> Hello all, >> >> I'm not sure if it's in the plans yet or not, but I've been thinking >> about having a dictionary/spelling panel that replaces the GNUstep >> spelling panel. My idea is to combine a dictionary with the spelling >> checker, because they really ought to be together. I'm not sure how >> DictionaryReader.app works, but some of it's code may be reusable. I am >> equally ignorant to the licenses of all those *spell projects, but they >> could be useful as well. >> >> I'm not sure what free dictionaries there are out there, but Wiktionary >> looks pretty cool to me... > > Having dictionary and spell checker together is a good idea. > But I would like to have it independent from network. > In another word, it would be nice to have a local copy of data. > I am one of the people who do not have constant network. > It would also be nice to use existing dictionary/spell database. > Otherwise, there is no way for me to write a English-Chinese > dictionary just for that. > And for spell checking the speed is something important than dictionary. > A dictionary with spell-checking is a very good idea, > but a spell checker with dictionary is not that useful. Very true. When you're checking a document's spelling, you're not as interested in each word's meaning. David Chisnall wrote: > The spell checking, I believe, is exposed through the services system. > > I agree with Yen-Ju that we need offline dictionary access. If you > look at the way OS X does this, dictionary and spell checking are > both handled as services, with a standard UI added to text views (new > ones could possibly be done as categories on NSTextView by Étoilé?). I like the way Mac OS X integrates the dictionary into their text views. > In principle, I think it's a great idea. In practice, there are a > few issues. I see a few differences between a spelling word list and > a dictionary: > > 1) Users add to their own wordlist. Each user gets there own dictionary which they can edit at will. This is where a user's added words will be put. > 2) Wordlists usually contain some strange markup to indicate > permutations (e.g. plurals). And how does a dictionary figure that sort of thing out? > 3) Dictionaries have definitions. How would this affect us? > In some cases, it might be possible to share data between the two, > although I am not certain (the kind of format used in a wordlist is > generally more suited to fuzzy searching than a dictionary, but it > might not matter). Right. > I would suggest that adding the ability to support multiple data > sources would be a good feature for a dictionary. I believe dict.org > has an out-of-copyright version of MW you can download, which would > be okay for offline use, and connecting to something like Wiktionary > for online use might also be nice. Thanks, Isaiah Beerbower _______________________________________________ Etoile-discuss mailing list Etoile-discuss@gna.org https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/etoile-discuss
