On 20/06/2012 10:28, Andre Fischer wrote: > On 19.06.2012 18:37, Stuart Swales wrote: > [...] >> Please don't merrily discard the English language variant dictionaries - >> they are really really important. > > The reason for wanting to drop some of the english extensions is not a > disregard for (of?) the english language and its variants. In older > versions of OpenOffice only the dict-en extension was included. It is > probably my fault that there are now five dictionary extensions. > > I added the functionality for downloading and integrating the extensions > into the installation sets and used the information on [1] to setup the > initial list of extensions to bundle. Maybe the time has come to reduce > that list to what is really needed. > > dict-en seems to support the variants (AU,CA,GB,US,ZA). I say "seems" > because I am neither a linguist nor do I have information beyond what > the pages in the extension repository provide (see links to english > dictionaries on [1]). I don't know if the separate dictionaries for > AU,NZ,CA, and US contain anything that is not already included in dict-en. > > If you or anybody else have/has more information then please share that > with the rest of us so that we can make a decision based on facts > whether to keep or to drop the extensions. > > -Andre > > > [1] > https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OOOUSERS/Bundled+Writing+Aids
I can only really speak for en_GB here - David Bartlett put in a lot of work to get a usable British English dictionary going in the early days of OpenOffice.org and life was made much easier once that was incorporated into the main build. Obviously 95% or so of the word list will be common across the English language variants but the 5% or so that does differ matters greatly to 'natives'. British English spelling does vary trivially but significantly from US English spelling. We have important users over here including universities, a national newspaper, city councils... If we were to kick out all non-en_US variants from the core build then I guess users here would be surprised at the regression. They would have to figure out how to find and download the appropriate extension, which I think could be beyond a fair proportion of them, leading to gripes about Apache OpenOffice 'not being as good as the old one'. My 2p. - Stuart Swales
