Gervase Markham wrote:
>> The easiest short-term solution on Windows might be just to use the
>> existing spell checker that comes with MS Word.
>
> I think you'd probably find mozilla.org taking a dim view of checking
> features into the tree that worked only on one platform.
Doesn't matter... Define an programmatic interface, and it doesn't
matter how you implement it. You can implement it in terms of ispell or
aspell on Unix, MS Word speller on Windows, etc.
I just selected File Open from the browser, and lo and behold, a Windows
standard file open dialog! Gee, why didn't the Mozilla team reimplement
a cross-platform file open dialog? Did they have to provide some
implementation for platforms which don't have such a standard dialog?
As I said, this is a short-term solution. With a little bit of work, you
can implement the interface by dynamically linking to the Word
spellcheck functionality. Then later you can replace the implementation
to reach the 5% of Windows users who didn't get Office pre-installed on
their computers.
The point is that with a little reuse we can largely solve the
spellcheck issue on a major platform. With a little more work we can
reuse ispell and friends and solve the spellcheck issue on the *nix
platforms. *Then* we can go back and reimplement the spell checker if
necessary.
David
