Nice Little Improvement in LibreOffice 3.6.2.2

Now when adding a word to the dictionary, LibreOffice just adds the word, without forcing the user to choose dictionaries. Going back to Star Office, there were usually two dictionaries by default and the choice of which to add a word to seemed arbitrary. Then for the past few years, the default configuration had just one dictionary, but still forced the user to choose the only choice. Now, with just one choice, LibreOffice assumes the only choice is the one the user wants. Yes. Keep the common case fast.

It's still not a very good dictionary application, being hopelessly bad at offering possible corrections. Ispell is very good. No other dictionary comes close.

Useful "New" Firefox Feature

I am not a fan of GUI-based spellcheckers since it is so easy to miss a misspelling. I much prefer ispell within emacs. In particular, ispell does a great job (compared to any GUI I've seen) of suggesting alternatives, emacs and ispell together do a great job of accepting words for a session across multiple documents, and emacs understands various file formats and doesn't try to tell me that, for example, an HTML tag is not a valid English word. Well, it has long been a common opinion that GUIs are great for beginners but don't particularly reward more experienced users with better productivity. I particularly dislike spell checking within OpenOffice, since when adding to the dictionary one has to always specify which dictionary to save a word to, even if there is only one dictionary. Make the common case fast? I don't think that's a concept OpenOffice developers are familiar with.

So how can one make it less likely to miss misspellings before sending an e-mail, submitting a form, etc? Firefox 3.6 and newer has a nice feature that's a pain to enable, ui.SpellCheckerUnderlineStyle. See http://kb.mozillazine.org/Ui.SpellCheckerUnderlineStyle. I particularly like option 4, which places a double line under each misspelled word. But the article just cited does not give explicit instructions for enabling the feature.

1) Open about:config
2) Right click in the list of preferences and select new.
3) For the new preference name, use ui.SpellCheckerUnderlineStyle.
4) For the type, use integer.
5) For the value, use your preferred value from the MozillaZine article. 5 is the default, a wavy red line. My preference is 4, a double line.

Thew and Fro

Spell checkers allow users to add words to their dictionaries. It would be nice if they would also allow users to subtract words. Two frequent typos of mine are 'thew' for 'the' and 'fro' for 'for'. Unfortunately, both typos are English words, though neither is a word I use at all often. Almost always when either occurs in my writing it's a typo. So why can't I tell ispell or Open Office or Firefox or Thunderbird that these are words that should be flagged as misspellings? Actually, I could write a postprocessor for LaTeX documents that flags likely typos, but it would be harder to do this for a clumsier tool, like the WYSIWYG tools. Also this points out a problem with non-text-based tools for text-based applications. A postprocessor would work fine for text files, which means it would be more widely applicable than to just LaTeX, but every GUI has its own spell checker, with its own dictionary, and so they don't integrate well with each other, with simple tools, etc. Going back to elm or mutt for e-mail would solve part of this problem, by raising my productivity for basic e-mail by allowing the editing of e-mail in emacs, but they make multimedia e-mail a bit more of a challenge. OTOH, perhaps they've improved attachment handling in the past few years--worth a look.