[Scribus] Spell checking

[Gora Mohanty]

Hi,
  I have a first-cut version of the spell-checking plugin which seems to
be working. I need to add a mechanism to get text from Scribus, and run
it through the spell-checker. Petr has pointed me to the shortwords
plugin, and I will try to work that in over the next couple of days.

On Sat, 2007-05-19 at 09:46 -0400, Louis Desjardins wrote:
> 2007/5/18, avox <avox at arcor.de>:
[...]
>         In 1.3.4 there is a charstyle property "language()" which
>         should be used for 
>         spellchecking, hyphenation and shortwords.

OK. I will look at it. There are essentially two things that need
to be solved for choosing an appropriate default for the user in
need of spell-checking, the first being the language that she
would use, and the second the character encoding that the words
would be entered in. From where things stand, it should be possible
to accommodate both, but I think that the first version of the
plugin will assume Unicode (UTF-8) for the character encoding. Are
there any issues, other than efficiency, with this?

> As an additionnal note, I think the default language for spellchecking
> should be the GUI language of the app.

I will need more information about this. Is this information
available somewhere, e.g., as some Scribus preference setting.
 
>  On top of that, once the char style are fully implemeted, the
> spellchecking could then by tributary to the language selected for a
> particular stylesheet.  Could this be done on the fly through an
> entire document where many languages would be used and each would be
> spellchecked with the appropriate dictionary?

This is possible, but I am not so convinced about its utility. The
current version of the plugin has a settings tab that can be used to
select a different aspell dictionary (loosely speaking, different
language, but one language might have multiple dictionaries). Does
that suffice?

>  Also, user has to make a language choice when a text is not set using
> stylesheets. This then calls for a dialog displaying the language it
> is set to and the ability to change it from within that dialog. 

OK, this is part of the plugin, but as a tab in the dialog. That tab
is given focus at start-up, if the user has not previously chosen a
dictionary (language).

>         Squiggly lines will have to wait for 1.3.6, since that
>         requires changes to
>         how
>         the text is stored and displayed

OK.

>         Another possibility would be to integrate spellchecking with
>         the Preflight
>         Verifier.
> 
> Right. From a production point of view, having such a flag would be
> great. Case: the Preflight raises a flag on a text, telling it
> discovered n errors. 
[...]

Sounds interesting, and quite possible to implement. Is there any
documentation for Preflight, and how I can make use of it?

> The use of a spellchecker should not mislead users and make them think
> a piece of software could replace a proofreader... ;) To me, a proper
> workflow means the texts are read, revised and proofread before they
> are put in the layout. Everything fits tightly in a layout. A single
> word (even a single glyph) added can change many things. 
[...]

Quite right. I have seen too many supposedly reputable publications
that have substituted automated spell-checking for proof-reading, and
copy editing, with horrendous results. However, I do not see that it
is the place of a spell-checker plugin to enforce a workflow.

Regards,
Gora