POds's Journal: It's time for Integrated Spell Checkers

I think its time for a change. Well not a change, more of an improvement, or a broadening of the use of a specific technology. I'm the worlds worst speller, and i put it down to the fact that English is the most difficult language in the world.

Spell checkers are a major application these days. We've got them in Word processing applications (all the major ones have they're own implementation) email clients and soon hopefully someone will think of putting them in the web browser so we can use it when posting to a forum or guest book.

But i want people to go a step further. I just don't want to be able to use them in select applications, i want to be able to use them in everyone application. Just like on windows or X11 where any application can take advantage of the global clipboard, so should any application be able to take advantage of a global spell checker.

I want to use it in my browser, email client, word processor, text editor, HTML editor and even paint program. Why hasn't anyone implemented a global spell checker? Gnome hasn't got one, KDE hasn't got one, MacOSX hasn't got one and neither has Windows. Surely im not the first person to come up with this. Im sick of copying text to applications that do have spell checkers and copying it back to the application that doesn't. Its plain annoying.

I would really like to hear peoples comments on this because it seems like an obvious thing to do. It'll benefit everyone and if its done, every application will not only have a spell checker but they'll have the same spell checker, which brings less inconsistences between programs.

And just incase your wondering, this was spell checked by Mozilla Thunderbird.

remote spell checker

[POds]

Taking this further, the spell checker could be implemented as a daemon and thus, other computers from the local network could also use it, much like the xfont server.

I feel things like this is a good idea because light weight and CPU in-intensive clients can be made. Also, its a bit of a wast if every machine on the network needs a spell checker and they all impliment they're own.

How it should work

[POds]

Looks like i've forgotten to add quite a bit to this journal entry. Everyone knows how to use the clipboard in windows, that is, you select a word and either copy and cut using the context menu (right mouse button) or ctrl+c and ctrl+x respectivly. Then once it has been copied to the clipboard to past, ctrl+p.

I feel it should work very similar to this. That is, you can select a word or a whole document and click the spell check entry in the context menu or press ctrl+s.

Its in Opera

[Organized Konfusion]

Download Opera and install Aspell, notice how the context menu now shows spellcheck as an option.

Re:Its in Opera

[POds]

I would, but i'm in love with the bird's you see. Hmm, that doesnt actualy sound that bad when i say it like that.

Apparantly Mozilla will be getting something like this in 1.6? Which would be good. That means text editors, and jabber clients should be able to make good use of it, include the main apps.

for an AmigaOS integrated Spellchecker

[vortexau]

On the AmigaOS-

How about a Dictionary.datatype with a Dictionary Dir and hot-keys to add the function to COPY and PASTE?

Again, Locale could fit into the operation structure somehow.
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