When I first started using BeOS about 5 years ago I was very impressed with the spellchecker in BeMail. The way it works is a model of elegance. But I was surprised to see that Be hadn’t included the same system in StyledEdit.
Now, I see it’s working in the Haiku Mail app (if you import the dictionary files from BeOS).
Is there any reason why it cannot be adopted in the Haiku StyledEdit?
Of course, it would need some modification to allow for the different font colours supported by StyledEdit; it can’t just assume black and display red for the flagged words…
why we have to limit that feature only for those two apps.
what about a spellchecker and thesaurus system for every BTextView?
So every application ( i.e.: like a native browser) could have it without bloating its code.
And according to Wikipedia, it’s under LGPL, so it should be license friendly too.
A system-wide speller that can be enabled/disabled at the application level would be nice. But this looks more like a third party project; at least, I think the Haiku devs have bigger fish to fry (more important low level stuff to deal with) at the moment.
If there is anyone out there interested in working on such a project, don’t forget: OSDrawer.net is your friend.
Hi,
I think Aspell is good, but i hope after Haiku R1,
we become a system with a Spell checker, who is then in every apps. (Input_server will be Hacket )
The other part is a LocalKit.
LocalKit and SpellCheck in the System is verry good for the UserBase.
I’m not at all familiar with Aspell, but my initial thought was that we already have a spell checker, included in Mail. I’m assuming that that code could be transplanted elsewhere with (relatively) little hassle.
As for system-wide spell-checking, that too was at the back of my mind. (It was Leaflord’s post in the Creative Design forum, in which he’s suggesting system-wide text editing services using vi (!), which got me thinking about it.)
Perhaps some sort of ProofReading server, available to any app, and offering spelling, thesaurus, even grammar? (Grammar, I assume, being the hardest to implement and therefore the least priority.)
The spell checker code may be there, but I doubt (although I don’t know for certain) that the dictionaries required to make it work are freely available.
In contrast, ASpell is open source, has dictionaries for many languages and it is actively being developed. It it also available as a library, so I guess it could be integrated in a way that it becomes available system-wide. This sounds like a good start point.
