There is something very wrong. The following was spell checked and came
up with all correct!
Larst weke i courent eevein speel ofiser now i aree wone.
This is obviously a case of the spell checker not working at all, not of
a bug or design problem. We can't help the original poster more until he
tells us whether he has told the program that the language of the text
is (any kind of) English and whether he has installed the necessary
language file ("dictionary") if it's not one of those included in the
download package.
Phill, did you look in the help file? It's very deficient and chaotic,
but i'll try to explain the missing info:
Press F1, go to the index tab, type in "languages" and read the
directions for "activating modules". The most important sentence there
is this: "A language entry has a check mark in front of it if the
spellcheck is activated for this language." This is missing a link
explaining how to install missing languages, and the help file's index
is also missing this entry under "language(s)" and all of the following
entries!:
"language, installation"
"languages, add new ones"
"dictionaries, install new ones"
Even worse is the very badly designed user interface; if the user has
found his/her way to tools > options > languages > default languages for
documents, there should obviously be a button called "Add new
languages". Instead, the user has to go hunting through all the menus to
find file > wizards < install new dictionaries.
Once you've installed the dictionary for the language you want, you need
to follow the directions in the help file for "languages > selecting".
In other words, the help file is completely chaotic and is missing
essential information, entire entries, and doesn't even try to put
everything in one logical entry called "language and spell check settings".
Where should one send feedback to help improve the help file?
PS:
The rest of this message is not of much help to Phill (except for the
warning *not* to delete a user dictionary and the explanation that spell
checkers work in the opposite way to what he thinks) since Phill hasn't
even got his spell checker running yet, but it may interest those users
who have a functioning spell checker:
Phill,
I copied the above sentence and ran it through the spell checker in OOo
V2.0.1 and this is what I ended up with:
last week i courent eevein spell ofiser now i are one.
Then I put it in MS Word 2000 and this is what I finished with:
Last week I courent even spell officer now I are wone.
If the correct word was NOT in the suggested spelling, I just selected
"Ignore." Some mispelled words are too far off the original word that
spellcheckers cannot suggest the correct version of the word.
That is an incorrect way to compare the results of OO and Word and not a
very productive way of using any spell checker. As the original poster
himself pointed out, even bad spellers do not necessarily need to be
offered the correct choice for a word that is spelled so incorrectly
that the spell checker can't guess what word is meant. What *is*
necessary is that the incorrect spelling is flagged as "not in
dictionary". Most people have a dictionary or other means to find the
correct spelling; all they need is a warning.
I would
suggest you delete the "user's dictionary" and retry the sentence again.
That's a much too drastic measure to suggest except in cases where one
is sure that the user has not already spent a lot of time adding
important entries to this. In this case, we don't even know if the user
has added any entries to the user's dictionary. This suggested drastic
step also needs directions because they are impossible to find in the
help file.
Spellcheckers are nice to have but do not always suggest the correct
spelling.
Yes, but for probably 99% of all people it is usually enough to be told
that the word is not in the dictionary. In this normal, real-life
situation, the results for the OO 201 and Word 2000 spell checks are as
follows in analysing this sentence:
>> Larst weke i courent eevein speel ofiser now i aree wone.
- Three errors not identified by OO:
i
courent
aree
- All errors identified by Word
Most bad spellers would therefore have been able to produce an entirely
correct sentence in Word (by looking for correct spellings in a
dictionary for the flagged incorrect spellings "courent" and "wone" for
which Word wasn't able to guess what was meant), but not necessarily in
OO because especially "courent" looks like a possible spelling. In
addition, use of the spelling "i" is becoming very common, i use it too,
so many bad spellers would need the hint that this is not (yet) standard
enough to not cause problems in a job application or other official
contexts. The spelling "aree" is probably an error that no one would
ever make except as a typo. However, it's sign of a bad bug in OO that
it does not identify this and probably many similar typos.
Of lesser interest but still interesting are the following comparisons
between OO and Word:
- Identified errors for which correct solution was not suggested at all:
OO: eevein, ofiser (plus 3 completely unidentified errors)
Word: courent, wone
- Identified errors for which correct solution was not first suggestion
offered (including identified errors for which no correct solution was
offered):
OO: Larst, eevein, speel, ofiser (plus 3 completely unidentified errors)
Word: courent, eevein, speel, wone
Hi, could you tell me how I can add more words to the spell check
feature. I'm a terable speller but I know when a word is wrong but the
spell check doesn't pick it up.
Phill, no one has yet explained that spell checkers work the other way
round to what you thought. They don't have or need lists of incorrect
spellings; instead, they flag all words not in their dictionary/ies as
unknown (bad spell checkers label them as incorrect instead of saying
"not in dictionary" or, better yet, "not in the installed dictionaries"
- OO's "Not in dictionary" sounds like "not in any published English
dictionary" i.e. "doesn't exist in the English language").
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