Hi Bruno and community:

I will add my comments to the API proposal (so far).

> 1-) The grammar checker should run in a different thread to not block
> OpenOffice.

+1

> 2-) The API must provide text placed inside table cells, text headers and
> footers, enumerations and text boxes (Drawing Objects).

I don't disagree here. But my experience shows that generally, text
found in tables (mostly in headers), and drawing objects, completely
disregards grammar rules; sometimes because of space restrictions, or
because this kind of texts are used to summarize info.
It will be good if you can have options in UI to turn these checkings on
or off, as spellchecking does.

> 3-) OpenOffice should be able to replace the wrong sentences without
> losing format.

This will be ideal. But can be a little tricky because the grammar
checker will check a text portion that possibly includes varying
character formats and styles.
So, the standard replacement method provided by OOo must be used. Also,
this is what happens with spellchecking. As prove of concept, write an
incorrect spelled word, and make some of the chars bold, when you
spellcheck and replace the word, this format is lost.

> 4-) I think we should create an unified User Interface, for any grammar
> checker use it, with grammar checkers common options.

+1

> 5-) Automatic checking should run in background and marking the wrong
> sentences with a wavy line. It could be enabled and disabled, like Spell
> Checker. 

+1

> 6-) The API must know how to split paragraphs into sentences, this was
> changed to provide multilingual checking.

AFAIK the API knows about sentences (service XSentenceCursor), but it's
probably a fair simple implementation, that needs to be re-worked and
extended for what you expect it to be; and more: it has to be language
specific.

I think OOo must send complete paragraphs to the grammar checker. That's
because the paragraphs are conceptual units. All sentences in paragraphs
are, by definition, related to the same subject. And in many languages
there MUST be inter-sentence checkings. In my language for example
(Spanish) one of the most useful tests is to check for mistakes in
gender or number correspondences (and this correspondences could be
inter-sentence).

I understand this imposes a problem with multilingual texts. But I think
this is too much fine-grained for this moment. I would prefer to have a
simpler API to interact with a grammar checker for my language in the
next months, than to wait a couple years to have a more powerful and
rich API to handle that kind of documents. A simpler API could have
options to "turn off checking for multi-lingual paragraphs" or "split
sentences for checking multi-lingual paragraphs", and OOo API would use
his sentence boundary detection capabilities to feed a sentence to each
grammar checker.

> 7-) We are supposing that the smallest unit to be considered (for a 
> language) is a sentence.

This would be true for the grammar checker, not for the API, unless
handling multilingual paragraphs. But the grammar checker's suggested
corrections could involve the replacement of one or more words (perhaps
even a complete sentence, in extreme cases).

> 8-) Grammar checkers don't interact with details of OOo writer (format,
> footnotes, fontsize). This is API work.

Yes, I agree with this. And I think is strongly related with point 3).
These should be issues handled by OOo API and not by the grammar
checker.

> 9-) The API should provide a paragraph (for example) to grammar checker
> and this one should return a list. If there is no mistake in this paragraph, 
> the
> list should be empty, else the list should contain ...

Again, OOo must provide a paragraph to the grammar checker. The grammar
checker should return nothing when there is no error, or return a list
of wrong sentences inside the paragraph with his associated replacements
(if they exists).

> 10-) (Matthew Strawbridge) UI Language could be passed as a parameter to
> grammar checker, which could choose to ignore it or to return comments
> in that language if it knows how. 

This seems correct to me, but again too much fine-grained for this
moment.

> 11-) There will be two types of grammar-checking: real-time checks,
> displayed as wavy lines in the document, and interactive checks
> of the whole document via a dialog box.

> 12-) (Matthew Strawbridge) It should be possible to have both spell checkers
> and grammarcheckers enabled at the same time. If people choose to use
> grammar checkers that have built-in dictionaries, they can choose to turn
> off the spell checker, but I think the option to have both running should be
> there.

+1.

Best regards,

Santiago Bosio.

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