On Tue, Sep 16, 2003 at 07:51:48AM +1000, I wrote: > I think there should be a number of dictionaries: > [big snip] > One dictionary is not enough
and shortly thereafter Peter Harkins replied:
Your ideas are pretty interesting (and I can think of a few situations for myself where it'd be pretty handy). This isn't quite the place for them, though. LyX is a nice graphical program, but it works by farming out all the specialized work to other established programs. In the case of spell checking, it calls out to ispell or aspell. If LyX were to implement them, it would have to take on the whole task of writing and maintaining a spell-checker program rather than the considerably smaller task of interfacing with them.
So the best place to bring up your revisions is on the ispell and aspell programs (urls below). When they support the features, bring back some information on how programs interface with them, and LyX will be set for someone to write the code to use them.
http://aspell.sourceforge.net/ http://fmg-www.cs.ucla.edu/fmg-members/geoff/ispell.html
I'm not sure that this is not the right place to raise these issues. Although I described the "other" four dictionaries as either "Global" or "Ad Hoc" the fact is that all four dictionaries would be user-specific: the two "Globals" might be used right across a particular network (LAN or even WAN); and the two "Ad Hocs" might be confined to a specific PC or a single workgroup. But these additional four dictionaries, which I would have carefully built up over time to suit the purposes of myself and my organisation, might not be any use to you.
For example, I might start off my Global Additive Dictionary with the names of all the towns, villages and localities here in Oz. This might be of benefit to an Aussie junk mail distributor, but it would be a hindrance to any body outside Oz.
As I see it, the important factors of my other four dictionaries are that they can (and should) be compiled by the individual user, or the sysadmin plus the user.
Is the ability to apply more than one dictionary _not_ a proper function of LyX/LaTeX/TeX?
Robert Thorsby
