>Any plans to add spell checking to AbiWord? It's great but I can't >realistically use a word processor that doesn't have spell checking... (and >I'm not big on add-on spell checkers!). I plan to add support for the Word Services Suite to abiword's MacOS and BeOS versions. That allows you to drop a variety of text services such as spellchecking into the menu. It can also be used for other operations on text such as encryption (more useful for email), word counting, HTML verification and the like. Unfortunately Word Services is built on top of proprietary OS-specific scripting API's. On MacOS it uses the Apple Object Model and Apple Events. On BeOS it uses the BeOS scripting conventions and BMessages. So Word Services won't be able to work on XWindows, unless there is some kind of accepted standard for communicating with an application about document content in a structural form on X11. With Apple Events or the BeOS, I can ask a word processor a question like "can I have the text of the first 3 paragraphs in the document named 'foo'?" Once you can do something like that, the implementation of Word Services is very simple, requiring just a couple hours to integrate the sample code. You can find out more about it at http://www.wordservices.org -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] Geometric Visions - the Art and Music of Michael David Crawford http://www.geometricvisions.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow
