(Note: Mostly this email dates from pre-Christmas December - took me
awhile
to post!)
(This is a bit more verbose than it should be, as I am presently stuck in
an historic colonial hill station of Tunisia, by the Algerian border, and
being winter the weather is bitter and I am therefore locked in my hotel
room with time, but no internet connection!)
Whilst using LyX 2.0beta1 [since verified on LyX 2.0beta3] I recently ran
a spell check for the first time.
The interface is good and no doubt an improvement on previous eras,
however
the following struck me as possible to improve.
Those items marked with "[*]" I consider a bug in LyX. Those items marked
with "[X]" I consider a bug elsewhere.
1. Preferences|Language Settings|Spellchecker [*]
----------------------------------------------
Fields lack a description. Faced with having used non-US spelling
in my document ("for shame!"), I do not want to manually set hundreds
of individual words to be 'English (UK)', which using the inbuilt
right
sidebar interface appears to be the default way forward. (For some
reason, 'English (AU)' is not even an option on my system, though
that's
probably my fault.)
Thus driven to the preferences dialog, I was unsure of which mystical
value to enter in to the great LyX machine. Assuming 'man aspell'
would
clear it up, indeed some text was located that made the expected
format
for the entry of a single language value probable:
"It follows the same format of the LANG environmental variable on
most systems. It consists of the two letter ISO 639 language code
and
an optional two letter ISO 3166 country code after a dash or
underscore."
I tried this ("en_AU"), and it did work. However, there are two
problems:
- Even the first step would be a challenge for some users
- I would like to add multiple values to the field, since otherwise
even
at this early stage of my document still hundreds of words and
place
names in French, German, Greek (+romanised Greek), Chinese
(+romanised
Chinese), etc. trip up the spell checker. (Use of these languages
is frequent and scattered right throughout the document.)
The method to do this (eg: separate multiple values with a space or
comma),
or indeed whether entering multiple values in to this field is at all
possible remains unclear.
Whilst the ideal route would be to add (relatively) complex
integration
code that auto-detected available spellcheckers, their dictionaries,
and provided a sexy GUI for end user language selection instead of a
mystical text field, I realise this is not going to happen overnight
or
perhaps ever.
Thus, as a relatively easy half-way fix, could we please have some
increased on-screen documentation? Something like "eg: 'en_GB' for
aspell." may suffice for 95% of users.
2. Right click to set spellchecker language on a highlighted word fails
[*]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
It appears that when 'Tools|Preferences|Language
Settings|Spellchecker|
Spellcheck continuously' is set, and red-wavy (Note: LyX 2.0.0beta1
was
wavy, LyX 2.0.0beta3 is straight and thicker) underlined words are
right
clicked, there is an option to set their language for spellchecking
purposes. However, this does not appear to actually do anything!
This makes it necessary for the user to select the word then use
'Edit|
Language|Whatever language' to actually perform the change - pointless
tedium.
3. Wider problem of spellchecking and multilingual support
-------------------------------------------------------
Regarding points 1 and 2, really there is a wider problem of
multilingual
support being a little 'all over the place', with a bunch of different
"solutions" in use. In terms of LyX, none of these are really
"solutions"
as even with LyX 2.0beta1 it appears to be demonstrably impossible to
link
the manual language markup made in conjunction with a font-linked
solution
to the manual language markup required for spellchecking purposes.
The TeX-world's colourful background to all this is understandable,
and of
course I would not suggest to fly in the face of either
configurability
nor tradition nor the existing user base's preferences, however to my
mind
it would be expedient for ease of use (especially for new users with
little TeX background, who - let's face it - represent the largest
possible and probable future user base) if LyX would 'encourage'
people
to an 'intelligent' default solution instead of leaving them high and
dry
with a "there's 1000 ways to do it but we're not really going to hint
at
any of them" situation, as we see at present. Now, I see the adoption
of XeTeX-specific checkboxes in LyX 2.0beta1 as a *great* step forward
in this direction, but "there's a ways to go yet".
As per previous posts whereby I suggested revising the user interface
to
make proper use of available databases and let the user assign fonts
to unicode blocks and/or languages and/or custom defined text-types
for
font selection purposes, a forward-looking, integrated solution should
also take in to account spellchecker requirements.
Otherwise, we poor users are laboured with having to make 1000 manual
markups just to include a short bit of text! This is exemplified if,
for instance, one wishes to quote a place name with translations and
their
romanised equivalents in situ at many points throughout a document
(my unfortunate situation, and before anyone asks: no I cannot switch
to
compiling a reference table, for reasons of readership and
readability)
In summary, a short list of user-side 'wants' for such a future
upgrade
to multilingual support would be:
- works with unicode TeX systems (XeTeX)
- works with TTF
- provides dialog based font selection (see previous post)
- provides dialog based language selection (see previous post)
- does not require duplicate language markup for the font subsystem
and the spellchecker subsystem
- upgrades the spellchecker subsystem to be more multilingual aware
Please do reference the previous message which included a UI mockup
for
further details on the proposed genre of solution:
http://www.mail-archive.com/lyx-users@lists.lyx.org/msg83635.html
http://pratyeka.org/unicode-font-mockup.png (hosted copy of mockup)
4. Weird behaviour with common prefixes and specialist compounds [X]
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Common prefixes such as micro and proto seem to confuse aspell. Not
sure
if this is somehow related to how it is linked from LyX, but I assume
the
issue is with them. For example, 'proto-<known word>' does not seem
to
be accepted, forcing 'proto' to be added manually as a valid word.
Unfortunately, the LyX interface does not offer a proper workaround.
(Please see point 5.)
(Note: Upon further investigation, actually a lot of words appear to
be
missing from the default dictionary, including "hewn", "proven",
"romanised". A scrabble player would be dismayed: for many points!)
(PS: Did anyone ever wonder about the etymology of 'hardscrabble'? I
think
aspell's default English dictionary could be involved in at least one
definition...)
5. Right sidebar spellchecker interface: word addition [*]
-------------------------------------------------------
At various points throughout my document I use accepted phrases within
the sphere of my writing such as "Proto-Austro-Tai" and "Tai-Kadai".
Whilst "Tai" and "Kadai" are also used as individual words, "Proto"
and
"Austro" are not. With the present spellchecker interface, when such
'word portions' occur, I am only given two options:
1. Adding these 'word portions' as words in their own right
2. Ignoring them as words in their own right
Both options are less than ideal because they will subsequently allow
the individual words to occur alone, ie: such that human input could
conceivably render "Come hither, pronto!" as "Come hither, proto!" and
the spellchecker would consider this to be correct, despite the fact
that proto should possibly not occur as a word in its own right.
(OK well that's probably arguable, but you still see the point!)
The best option for resolving this would be to modify the LyX
spellchecker
sidebar interface to allow adding arbitrary words or entire words
rather
than simply word portions thereof that have been identified by aspell
as
unknown. (ie: When presented with "Proto-Austro-Tai", and "Proto" is
highlighted, then the user should be able to add "Proto-Austro-Tai" as
a word in its own right rather than only the 'word portion' "Proto"
itself.)
(If I recall, 'other' word processing solutions include this feature.)
6. Dictionary Re-Use Support [*]
-----------------------------
Another point is that of re-use. Which is to say that, when someone
uses
for example 'BibTeX' to compile a biliographic database, that database
may easily be used with other projects and is considered portable. So
for all physics papers I can use one bibliography, and I may have
another
for history papers. Whilst this is presently handled adequately by
LyX,
the equivalent functionality is not present for dictionary databases.
It should be. This means both adding a 'manage multiple dictionaries
in
this project' feature-set, and adding a 'which dictionary do you want
to
add the word to' drop-down in the right hand spellchecker sidebar.
A big thank you to the hard working developers, please do not interpret
the
above as anything but forward looking ideas and constructive criticism,
your
hard work is brilliant and very well received!
Sincerely,
Walter Stanish
(Written while dodging wild boar trophy tusks in Ain Drahim, Tunisia.
Cleaned up and rechecked for LyX 2.0.0beta3 in the Hollywood Hills of
Los Angeles. CA.)
