🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1942@tansei.cc.u-tokyo.JUNET> b39756@tansei.cc.u-tokyo.JUNET (Martin J. Duerst) writes:
>   So why not create a new category of document parts, in the same way as
>may be graphics, tables, headers, footnotes, etc., are part of the
>document. As for graphics, where e.g. Word 3.0.x just lets Quickdraw
>draw a picture on screen or paper without caring about its contents,
>text in non-roman scripts could be treated in a similar way. Instead
>of calling Quickdraw, the WP would call TextEdit.

A very good idea...

>   As for users with languages like Finish, German, French, etc., where the
>script is the same as for English, and where the main problems are spelling
>and hyphenation, most WP nowadays have two alternative dictionaries for
>British and American English, and if some additional code (for different
>scanning strategies/word endings) is included in these dictionary files
>instead of being built into the WP, it will not be very difficult to
>internationalize these programs.

The right way to do it is to create a standard interface between the word
processor and hyphenator/spelling checker module. I posted my proposal in
comp.sys.mac.programmer a few months ago. The goal was not to force a strict
standard, but to generate talk about a need for such a standard. I hoped that
Apple would be interested in this aspect of localization, but as the local
Apple people told me, Apple isn't really interested in the international
market. I guess it's all just marketing hype.

>    (I'm not considering the economic
>     aspects (how many users are needed to make producing a foreign dictionary
>     profitable) nor the linguistic aspects (spelling checkers are much more

A standard interface would solve this problem. It would also help users choose
the best word processor and spelling checker separately instead of having to
live with the choices that someone else made when developing a program. The
programmer probably had other reasons besides quality, when he/she chose the
spelling/hyphenation routines.

>     difficult for most other languages than for english), but only the
>     software engineering aspects, which seem to be farely simple.)

Writing a spelling checker for Finnish is a very hard task, but fortunately
the government was interested in creating one. I believe the original program
was written in LISP and later on ported to the PC. Everyone agrees that TEKO+,
which includes MORFO (the spelling checker) is the worst PC word processor
in the market, but the Finnish government has declared it a standard. This
spring they decided the Mac was important enough to benefit from MORFO, so they
started porting TEKO+ to the Macintosh...I can guess what that will lead to.

They even asked if I was interested in writing the program or helping them. I
told them that they had the wrong approach to the problem.

Juri Munkki
Helsinki University of Technology Computing Centre
jmunkki@santra.hut.fi
jmunkki@fingate.bitnet

Disclaimer: Hey, what do I know about these things anyway?

P.S.	We got our FullWrite yesterday. I had to add modified international
	resources and the license agreement clearly states that the program
	should only be used in the US or Canada. I guess we'll have to do our
	own product support.