Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Spell-checker for 5.0 delivered

3: Re: Spell-checker for 5.0 delivered (response to 1)

Posted by Ola Hansson on 10/01/03 02:57 PM

I'm glad you like it ...

I agree with you that it's probably better to not enable spell-checking on "text" widgets by default. By changing this we might avoid having to hunt down the text elements that should absolutely not be checked for spelling - like email addresses and URLs, etc. - by adding the "nospell" flag to the element declaration.

Also, I think it is better to let the parameter default to "textarea 0 richtext 0", so that the "No" (as in "no, do not check spelling") radio button is selected by default for those two widgets. Doing it this way will cause less confusion and irritation, while at the same time advertizing the feature where it will do the most good, which undoubtably is in textarea and richtext widgets.

/Ola

4: Re: Spell-checker for 5.0 delivered (response to 3)

Posted by Tilmann Singer on 10/01/03 03:51 PM

This works really good - I was amazed by the idea to enable corrections with drop down boxes, nice.

But PLEASE - make the default "textarea 0 richtext 0". 99% of the normal text inputs make no sense to be spellchecked. (E.g. the value of the parameter setting itself 😉).

I wonder how this works with internationalisation - shouldn't it choose the language according to the users locale? Or - if no dictionary is available for the current locale - don't offer to spellcheck? I just tried spellchecking some german text with this feature and the suggested corrections made no sense at all of course.

Also it needs to be added to the installation instructions either, or it needs to check wether the spellchecker binaries are available and don't offer to spellcheck if not (which I'd prefer to be honest, propably it can be cached easily).

And a minor issue I noticed: when entering text with "quotes" in it, it messes up the error message somehow - it is not red anymore and not separated by a line break from the corrected text. Shouldn't the text outside the select widgets be html quoted?

Finally a little suggestion: I think it would be nice in case of spelling errors found, to offer the option to re-edit the whole text in a textarea again, in case the user wants to rearrange the text, change some words etc. This is not always achievable with the back button, e.g. when the form has been reloaded a few times already because of other input errors, so a little additional checkbox for that wouldn't hurt.

5: Re: Spell-checker for 5.0 delivered (response to 4)

Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 10/01/03 04:08 PM

First of all it looks really good (familiar actually ;)). And it works with form builder, so yes, great.

When we implemented the select boxes some time ago, we faced exactly your suggestion (wanting to edit the whole text) but decided the back button is your friend.

Furthermore, what happens if you mistype a word, that aspell does not recognize and therefore are not able to change it. We thought of javascript popups or some other things, but again back button is your friend.

Concerning the language, we decided to go with a select box that offers "no spellcheck" by default and all the languages that aspell has installed for the rest. But your idea is great. We should order the drop down box by local preference ;). But I'm not sure if Ola's solution of checking aspell without ns_aspell supports multiple languages for each widget at the same time.