Erez Yerushalmi wrote:
Dear all,
Just to re-kindle the fire, I would like to focus your attention to
http://www.lyx.org/Donate, *bug 718*.
Since I am a "spelling blind" person, I really hope that sometime soon, we
can add a *continous spell check* feature into lyx which will check your
spelling at every moment, and alert you with a red wavy line, telling you
that something is wrong.
Then you can decide to: keep it wavy, ignore it, correct it, or add it to
your private spelling library.
Some call this *spell-check-on-the-fly*
In past threads, there was one camp of users who thought that this feature
is SO ANNOYING and that we (the other camp) are just lazy to check at the
end of the day. But then, in the options, you'll have a choice to disable
this feature. So there is no point in NOT having this feature. All users
will thus benefit from this basic feature.
I'm not seriously opposed to this feature, and it may be that there's
sufficient infrastructure already in place that the implementation will
not add significantly to the complexity of the code. But, that said, it
isn't unreasonable to be concerned that it would do so. And from a
developer's point of view, this is potentially a Bad Thing. It is at
least something that needs to be weighed against the potential benefit.
Complexity makes the code harder to maintain, which makes bugs more
likely, and these can surface even when the new feature is off.
Just for example, the addition of unicode to LyX allowed us to roll CJK
and now Bidi support into LyX. But there was a cost, even to those of us
who do not use those features: If you look at the code, CJK and Bidi add
enormously to its complexity, and, what's worse, they do so in parts of
the code that are already extremely complex. In this case, the trade-off
is clearly worth it: Without CJK and Bidi, the program is just unusable
by a large number of people. (There are 1.2 billion potential LyX users
in China alone, right?!) But there were costs. And there will be in this
case, too.
I'm sure this will eventually go in, but it's worth being aware of all
the issues.
And IMHO, when it does go in, this should be off by default.
Richard Heck
