Posted: Tue Jan 20, 2009 8:02 pm Post subject: Fixing "Activating Dictionaries and Configuring Spellch
The page is a mess, and has been for almost as long as it has existed.
I've taken a quick stab at it today, ripping everything that's 2.x-specific out into a new article all its own, and annotating remaining parts of the article that need updating for 3.x.
I think the page really needs to be broken up, though. I think what I'd like to see is
1) a "landing page" that says the stuff at the top of the page (that currently gets lost, I think), that Neo will use the right Mac OS X dictionary, if available (possibly also the "Enabling"/"Disabling" sections that appear later on)
2) Below that, a list of pages on other subjects (sort of like how Lorinda does To Base and Back Again
a) A page (or possibly two, depending on how big it looks) on adding dictionary extensions and 3rd-party dictionaries for the Mac OS X spelling system
b) A page for the Troubleshooting section
c) A page for "Selecting the Dictionary to be Used in a Document or Section" (which is quite extensive right now)
d) In this list of sub-pages, link to the 2.x and 1.x articles, for anyone who needs them
3) Ending the main article with the link to the "Changing the UI language page" at the very end, as it is now.
This leaves the brand-new '"Exporting" the Word List from a User Dictionary' section an orphan; it can certainly have its own page and become d) in the list of sub-pages. (My "issue" with it is that I don't understand the use-case behind that tip; do you want to edit it to add words to it manually, or to take words you've added to Neo and then import them into your Mac OS X user dictionary, or...?)
Thoughts from other wiki elves?
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
Joined: Jun 20, 2006 Posts: 2051 Location: Midwest, USA
Posted: Tue Jan 20, 2009 8:22 pm Post subject:
I think this makes a lot of sense.
As for the "exporting" piece, I'm not sure what the op who asked about the procedure had in mind. I would think trying to edit it would prove to be risky business. The file contents differ when opened in TextEdit as opposed to NeoOffice (no #s in Text Edit), so there are probably "hidden" or obscure characters being used. But it might allow exporting the list for another Word Processing program. I think the value of having it in the wiki is that it's easier to find if the question is asked again. (And I think I've seen it asked at least once in the past).
Joined: Jul 05, 2005 Posts: 685 Location: North West England
Posted: Wed Jan 21, 2009 3:52 am Post subject:
User Sokilw has asked similar questions about this in relation to NO 2.2.5 and now in relation to 3.0.
Some WP software has the ability to import words into its (user) dictionary from a text file, and this might be one reason for doing it. For those migrating to NO it is more likely that they will want to bring a user dictionary with them. Unfortunately it appears that the OOo macro that might help with that doesn't run with 3.0 and the suggestion I made to him/her about turning the NO user dictionary into a text file does not work in reverse.
...and it's done, more-or-less. There are a few things left to clean up (and/or verify if they are still relevant for 3.0), but I think the pages are now much better than the single page we used to have. Hopefully everyone agrees.
The main article has now moved to Using Spellcheck in NeoOffice, since the old name was just a process of accretion.
The French and Italian versions of the page will need to be redone as well, and some link-fixing will need to be done across the other languages (everything will point to the old page and redirect to the new page, but some of the links will need to point to whichever new "sub-page" is appropriate, instead.)
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
Joined: Apr 25, 2006 Posts: 2315 Location: Montpellier, France
Posted: Sun Jan 25, 2009 3:06 pm Post subject:
Great work!
Just one thing I don't get:
NeoOffice will correctly configure your preferences to use the language tools (spell check, thesaurus, etc.) for the language that is set as the default in the System Preferences when you launch NeoOffice, provided you have the appropriate writing tools installed.
NeoOffice will correctly configure your preferences to use the language tools (spell check, thesaurus, etc.) for the language that is set as the default in the System Preferences when you launch NeoOffice, provided you have the appropriate writing tools installed.
What does that mean?
If you've got French set in System Preferences, NeoOffice will set up the OOo locale preferences correctly, and in turn new documents will use the French Mac OS X dictionary and the French OOo Thesaurus and Hyphenation dictionaries, if they are installed.
At least that's how I understood things to work; that basic paragraph has been around for some time now, so I may have missed some changes along the way. I suppose it really needs to say "first launch" because I don't think we reconfigure the OOo locale prefs on relaunch....
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
Joined: Apr 25, 2006 Posts: 2315 Location: Montpellier, France
Posted: Mon Jan 26, 2009 2:27 am Post subject:
sardisson wrote:
Samwise wrote:
Just one thing I don't get:
NeoOffice will correctly configure your preferences to use the language tools (spell check, thesaurus, etc.) for the language that is set as the default in the System Preferences when you launch NeoOffice, provided you have the appropriate writing tools installed.
What does that mean?
If you've got French set in System Preferences, NeoOffice will set up the OOo locale preferences correctly, and in turn new documents will use the French Mac OS X dictionary and the French OOo Thesaurus and Hyphenation dictionaries, if they are installed.
At least that's how I understood things to work; that basic paragraph has been around for some time now, so I may have missed some changes along the way. I suppose it really needs to say "first launch" because I don't think we reconfigure the OOo locale prefs on relaunch....
Actually, I don't think it's been like this in NeoOffice 2.x; if you don't set the default language for documents manually, new documents have no language. I just retrieved an older version of the page (26 December 2005), with this statement:
NeoOffice activates the language tools (spell check, thesaurus, etc.) for the language that is set as the default in the System Preferences when you launch NeoOffice, provided your language is one of the 12 shipped in the default NeoOffice install or you have the appropriate language pack installed.
Perhaps this was the old NeoOffice 1.x behavior, and someone mistakenly changed the wording of that paragraph when we updated the page for Neo 2.x, when it should have been removed?
Actually, I don't think it's been like this in NeoOffice 2.x; if you don't set the default language for documents manually, new documents have no language. I just retrieved an older version of the page (26 December 2005), with this statement:
NeoOffice activates the language tools (spell check, thesaurus, etc.) for the language that is set as the default in the System Preferences when you launch NeoOffice, provided your language is one of the 12 shipped in the default NeoOffice install or you have the appropriate language pack installed.
Perhaps this was the old NeoOffice 1.x behavior, and someone mistakenly changed the wording of that paragraph when we updated the page for Neo 2.x, when it should have been removed?
I disagree. If what you say was true, then there would be no spellchecking activated by default even if you press the AutoSpellcheck toolbar button.
All of my new documents have a "English (United States)" assigned to them since that is my preferred language in the System Preferences application. Even if I delete my NeoOffice-2.2 preferences folder, the new folder will have a default language of "English (United States)".
Joined: Apr 25, 2006 Posts: 2315 Location: Montpellier, France
Posted: Mon Jan 26, 2009 10:07 am Post subject:
Oh I see now. Since the Preferences… > Language Settings > Languages shows no default language for Western documents, I always thought spellcheck would not work at all.
It appears, however, that the spellchecker will indeed use the English dictionary when the document does not have any language set.
In this case (no language set for the document), we can only guess which dictionary is being used (unless we read that wiki article):
It appears, however, that the spellchecker will indeed use the English dictionary when the document does not have any language set.
No, it should use the matching language for your Language/Locale. If I have French topmost in System Prefs (and set Format to France, since it was set to US when I selected English on OS install/first run), language-less documents use the French dictionary (I assume the Mac OS X one and not the OOo extension, but I don't know what words to use to tell between them).
Samwise wrote:
In this case (no language set for the document), we can only guess which dictionary is being used (unless we read that wiki article):
I don't see that at all; I see either "English (USA)" or "Français (France)" depending on whether I'm testing normally or with System Prefs set to Français and France.
Incidentally, shouldn't that dialogue have a native (recessed) groupbox instead of the raised Windows one? Did we close the bug from Ed about some places not having the native groupboxes working correctly?
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
Incidentally, shouldn't that dialogue have a native (recessed) groupbox instead of the raised Windows one? Did we close the bug from Ed about some places not having the native groupboxes working correctly?
The OpenOffice.org code does not request that a native groupbox be drawn in this dialog. Instead, the OpenOffice.org code specifically draws a rectangular border.
Remember that OpenOffice.org does not use native Cocoa controls. The application code only calls down to the drawing code that we implement when it chooses to and requests the drawing code to draw a native control.
Incidentally, shouldn't that dialogue have a native (recessed) groupbox instead of the raised Windows one? Did we close the bug from Ed about some places not having the native groupboxes working correctly?
I reopened bug 3331 which was the original issue filed about this window.
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
The OpenOffice.org code does not request that a native groupbox be drawn in this dialog. Instead, the OpenOffice.org code specifically draws a rectangular border.
Oops, I reopened the bug and posted while you were posting that explanation
It's unfortunate that the OOo engineers still haven't learned to use the NWF in their code yet
(I did notice that OOo 3 has managed to completely suppress the rectangular border in that window, but who knows what kind of hack they have installed to do that?)
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
(I did notice that OOo 3 has managed to completely suppress the rectangular border in that window, but who knows what kind of hack they have installed to do that?)
Huh? I opened OpenOffice.org 3.0 before I posted. It clearly has the same rectangle as NeoOffice. The only difference is that the OpenOffice.org 3.0 background is lighter so maybe your system color scheme makes it hard to see.
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