https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=40504

--- Comment #7 from Nadav Har'El <[email protected]> 2012-03-04 01:40:22 
PST ---
Hi, I'm Nadav Har'El, the co-author of Hspell (hspell.ivrix.org.il), on which
the spell-checking dictionary you're using is based.

What to do with words with niqqud (or partial niqqud) is an issue we've long
been wondering about. What is the best thing to do - mark all of them as
errors? Mark all of them as correct? Anything else?
As I'll explain now, we decided that marking all of them as *errors* is
actually the best thing to do, so we don't consider this a bug.

Clearly, the best option would have been for Hspell to also know the right
niqqud, and accept שלום with a qamats on the shin, but *not* with a patach.
However, this will require Hspell to know the correct niqqud, which it
currently doesn't - and adding it will require a huge effort, which isn't
likely in the near future.

A second option could have been to simply ignore any niqqud marks, and
spell-check only the letters as if the niqqud isn't there. I believe this is
what you want. There are several serious problems with this suggestion: First,
it will lead the spell-checker to "accept" any niqqud, including wrong niqqud
(e.g., שלום with patach). A user who is not aware of this will believe the
computer is confirming that he wrote the right niqqud... The second problem is
that words with full niqqud (as opposed to partial niqqud) also have different
underlying spelling (fewer imot qri'a), so if you try to spell-check fully
vowelled text, you'll get many of your *correct* words marked as spelling
errors, when in fact they are not. For these two reasons, I don't like this
option: It implies that we can spell-check partial niqqud, while we can't, and
it implies that we can spell-check completely vowelled text, while in fact we
can't.

The currently-used third option is to mark any vowelled word as an error. The
user sees this "error", just like any unknown proper name and such are marked
as "errors", and has the option to verify this spelling on his own and add it
to his private dictionary. Indeed, long vowelled text will be entirely marked
as errors, but this is good because Hspell indeed can't verify its spelling! If
the user wants to exempt such paragraphs from being spell-checked, he can
easily do that - a text style can choose the "language" which it uses, and the
user can define a style which says its text is not in Hebrew (or in Hebrew,
without spellchecking).

A fourth option could have been to consider *any* word with niqqud as a correct
word. This eliminates the second problem of the 2nd option (you don't get
random errors on correct fully-vowelled text) and I actually prefer it over the
2nd option, but you still have the first problem - that the user *thinks* his
text is being spell-checked, when in fact it isn't.

So to summarize, I do believe that the current behaviour is reasonable, and not
a bug.

-- 
Configure bugmail: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/userprefs.cgi?tab=email
------- You are receiving this mail because: -------
You are the assignee for the bug.
_______________________________________________
Libreoffice-bugs mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/libreoffice-bugs

Reply via email to