[tdf-discuss] A humble critique about LO: grammar, dictionaries and basic usability
Hello. I wanted to reply this email, because I was having some minor usability issues about LibreOffice. Nothing too bad, but I wanted to share it with the team. I was helping my gf to do some university work, I installed her LibreOffice because she was used to OpenOffice and no problems to it. But there were some stuff was difficult to make for her, and also a bit to me too. I may not be a Linux guru, but I have some years of experience as user. Here we go: - About style and grammar checkers: I find quite confusing that they aren't bundled with LO itself, I need to install different packages. Despite this can be done easily by people used to Linux, others may have difficulties to find the correct package. Also, I see there are different extensions for different languages, yet they use Java most of the time (I don't consider it an adequate technology not just because it's by Oracle, but is a bloated dependency and may make things worse for slower systems). I see there are Languagetool, it supports lots of languages but requires java. There's lightproof, requires Python (it's not so efficient too) and supports too few languages at this moment. This feature is also bundled by default in Microsoft Office and lots of people use it to proofread their documents. There's a lack of automatically analyzing words written in other languages like Latin (quite used for terms), too. - About dictionary: Are dictionaries so big to make them bundled by default? Why not include them? Also, there were a lot of missing words in the Spanish dictionary and some lack of understanding about able to write compound words in both ways (f.ex. psico-social and psicosocial). - About page enumeration: While I agree showing advanced options is a plus, stuff like this is somewhat messy and confusing. Seriously, I had to check a few tutorials to find a correct way to avoid page enumeration to the first pages of a document and I had some issues replicating it later. It's difficult to remember it and it seems I got confused with page style or something like that (I can provide further details if needed). I just wanted to share my opinion to others, maybe I'm wrong at it in some way. But at least I tried to contribute a bit :) Regards. (Sorry for my bad English) -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to discuss+h...@documentfoundation.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: [tdf-discuss] A humble critique about LO: grammar, dictionaries and basic usability
On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 9:19 AM, timofonic timofonic timofo...@gmail.comwrote: Hello. I wanted to reply this email, because I was having some minor usability issues about LibreOffice. Nothing too bad, but I wanted to share it with the team. I was helping my gf to do some university work, I installed her LibreOffice because she was used to OpenOffice and no problems to it. But there were some stuff was difficult to make for her, and also a bit to me too. I may not be a Linux guru, but I have some years of experience as user. Here we go: - About style and grammar checkers: I find quite confusing that they aren't bundled with LO itself, I need to install different packages. Despite this can be done easily by people used to Linux, others may have difficulties to find the correct package. Also, I see there are different extensions for different languages, yet they use Java most of the time (I don't consider it an adequate technology not just because it's by Oracle, but is a bloated dependency and may make things worse for slower systems). I see there are Languagetool, it supports lots of languages but requires java. There's lightproof, requires Python (it's not so efficient too) and supports too few languages at this moment. This feature is also bundled by default in Microsoft Office and lots of people use it to proofread their documents. There's a lack of automatically analyzing words written in other languages like Latin (quite used for terms), too. - About dictionary: Are dictionaries so big to make them bundled by default? Why not include them? Also, there were a lot of missing words in the Spanish dictionary and some lack of understanding about able to write compound words in both ways (f.ex. psico-social and psicosocial). - About page enumeration: While I agree showing advanced options is a plus, stuff like this is somewhat messy and confusing. Seriously, I had to check a few tutorials to find a correct way to avoid page enumeration to the first pages of a document and I had some issues replicating it later. It's difficult to remember it and it seems I got confused with page style or something like that (I can provide further details if needed). I just wanted to share my opinion to others, maybe I'm wrong at it in some way. But at least I tried to contribute a bit :) Regards. (Sorry for my bad English) Thank you for your feedback. We're always looking to improve LibreOffice for you all (the users). We'll get a good healthy discussion about your points and see if there is any consensus about solutions :) Best Regards, Joel -- *Joel Madero* LibreOffice QA Volunteer jmadero@gmail.com -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to discuss+h...@documentfoundation.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: [tdf-discuss] A humble critique about LO: grammar, dictionaries and basic usability
On 02/12/2013 12:52 PM, Joel Madero wrote: On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 9:19 AM, timofonic timofonic timofo...@gmail.comwrote: Hello. I wanted to reply this email, because I was having some minor usability issues about LibreOffice. Nothing too bad, but I wanted to share it with the team. I was helping my gf to do some university work, I installed her LibreOffice because she was used to OpenOffice and no problems to it. But there were some stuff was difficult to make for her, and also a bit to me too. I may not be a Linux guru, but I have some years of experience as user. Here we go: - About style and grammar checkers: I find quite confusing that they aren't bundled with LO itself, I need to install different packages. Despite this can be done easily by people used to Linux, others may have difficulties to find the correct package. Also, I see there are different extensions for different languages, yet they use Java most of the time (I don't consider it an adequate technology not just because it's by Oracle, but is a bloated dependency and may make things worse for slower systems). I see there are Languagetool, it supports lots of languages but requires java. There's lightproof, requires Python (it's not so efficient too) and supports too few languages at this moment. This feature is also bundled by default in Microsoft Office and lots of people use it to proofread their documents. There's a lack of automatically analyzing words written in other languages like Latin (quite used for terms), too. - About dictionary: Are dictionaries so big to make them bundled by default? Why not include them? Also, there were a lot of missing words in the Spanish dictionary and some lack of understanding about able to write compound words in both ways (f.ex. psico-social and psicosocial). - About page enumeration: While I agree showing advanced options is a plus, stuff like this is somewhat messy and confusing. Seriously, I had to check a few tutorials to find a correct way to avoid page enumeration to the first pages of a document and I had some issues replicating it later. It's difficult to remember it and it seems I got confused with page style or something like that (I can provide further details if needed). I just wanted to share my opinion to others, maybe I'm wrong at it in some way. But at least I tried to contribute a bit :) Regards. (Sorry for my bad English) Thank you for your feedback. We're always looking to improve LibreOffice for you all (the users). We'll get a good healthy discussion about your points and see if there is any consensus about solutions :) Best Regards, Joel [Sorry if this does not come out right, even a person in a native English speaking country does not get his/her words right, let alone for those who had to learn English as a second or third language. My hat is off to anyone who can communicate in more than their native language. So not Sorry for my bad English. Nothing to be sorry for, in my honest opinion. ] - It is hard to build a good grammar checking system. There are specific differences with each language and sometimes differences within dialects of the same language [i.e. American, British, and Oxford English]. So building in a grammar checking system for each of the 100+ languages LO supports would be very hard to deal with. Also, sometimes rules for proper grammar can change over time. Those changes would need to be kept up-to-date. Let other projects who want to provide these grammar systems, who have the time and interest to get all the small details correct, do the work and provide the other FOSS project their work. Saves time and overlapping man-hours of work needed elsewhere. As for dictionaries, that is more my area. Yes, there are always going to be missing works. LibreOffice has access to over 20 different localized [by country] Spanish spell checking dictionaries. I know that there are words in American English [my language] that I found missing. There were words in my daily, weekly, monthly, correspondence that were not in the original English dictionaries I tried and used. When it comes down to specialty words for specific trade, work, or academic groups, there could be a long list of missing words. What I would do is contact the creators of the dictionaries and ask them to add the specific words you feel that they have missed. They might add them to the next version. I started out with an American English dictionary that had under 150,000 words. Then it grew to over 500,000 words. Then 600,000 words. Right now it is a little over 797,000 words for American English. Actually, if I added the rarely used and rare spellings words, it will grow to 1.5 to 2.0 million words. I created one that size once but decided not to publish it. Your question about compound words is a good one. I wish there was a good system that was able to do it better. We just have not had any programmer willing to take the
