Hi Daniel, I thought I would post publicly because there are probably other people using LT in a similar way.
Firstly, thank you and the other contributors for all your work on the tool. It’s outstanding. I’ve seen colleagues identify the potential of it right away, and I’ve also been pleased to be able to contribute a few rules to the core set. I use LanguageTool at my company, where I work as a software technical writer in a medium-sized team. We’ve replicated some of the rules from own in-house style guide, and we use the tool with Author-it (a technical writing tool) to check individual topics against the rules. We also use Acrolinx, a commercial tool which does many of the same things (though I realise there are major differences in approach and technology). We use both tools because each has limitations: although we don’t need to write rules manually for Acrolinx, it offers very little customisation, and only covers well-known rules (Chicago Style mainly). Conversely, we use LT where Acrolinx does not offer a built-in rule, or where the tooling can offer faster feedback than Acrolinx. However, we can’t justify the time involved in creating rules for our entire style guide in LT. We suspect also that some of them can’t be constructed in LT without resorting to Java code. So here are my concrete suggestions/ideas: 1) Known style guide rule sets We would like to have more coherent groups of basic rules, that together represent a complete style guide. Some examples for English would include Chicago Style, Strunk & White, Economist Style Guide and others. For technical writing it’s much more useful to say that text has been checked against a known style guide ruleset than the somewhat arbitrary set that ships with the tool. Especially when you’re justifying the effort involved in updating/creating rules to a manager! Also, there will be rules that will apply to multiple style guides (e.g. “use a serial comma” will probably be in Chicago & Strunk, as well as our own guide), so LT’s rule groups don’t quite allow the type of categorisation we want. Something like ‘tags’ for rules might work. I think concentrating on known style guides would lead to LT being used in new contexts, and would lower the barriers to entry. 2) Statistics and reports One thing Acrolinx gives you is a single numerical quality score, which (roughly) represents the number of errors divided by the text length. I think this would be a nice addition to LT. 3) More complex grammatical rules Apologies if this has already possible and I haven’t become aware, but we would like to be able to have complex rules like “Don’t use the hidden verbs” (e.g. “be capable of” —> “can”), or “use a comma after a subordinate phrase". Some of the rules in typical style guides stretch the limits of what’s possible with the regex-type syntax that LT uses. Hope this is helpful feedback. Regards, Graeme West gra...@heliocentrik.net > On 8 Feb 2016, at 14:39, Daniel Naber <daniel.na...@languagetool.org> wrote: > > Hi, > > I'm looking for language professionals to give me some feedback about > the future development of LanuageTool. If you're a translator, author, > reader in a publishing house, technical editor or similar, please email > me in private so I can ask some questions about how you use LT or how > you would like to use it. Or feel free to posts your ideas directly. > > Regards > Daniel > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Site24x7 APM Insight: Get Deep Visibility into Application Performance > APM + Mobile APM + RUM: Monitor 3 App instances at just $35/Month > Monitor end-to-end web transactions and take corrective actions now > Troubleshoot faster and improve end-user experience. Signup Now! > http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=272487151&iu=/4140 > _______________________________________________ > Languagetool-devel mailing list > Languagetool-devel@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/languagetool-devel ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Site24x7 APM Insight: Get Deep Visibility into Application Performance APM + Mobile APM + RUM: Monitor 3 App instances at just $35/Month Monitor end-to-end web transactions and take corrective actions now Troubleshoot faster and improve end-user experience. Signup Now! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=272487151&iu=/4140 _______________________________________________ Languagetool-devel mailing list Languagetool-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/languagetool-devel
