Re: Screenshots: Microsoft Word Spelling and Grammar dialog [WordPerfect]

On Sat, 12 Feb 2005, Andy Korvemaker wrote:

> Date: Sat, 12 Feb 2005 16:56:21 -0600
> From: Andy Korvemaker <abiword@andyland.ca>
> To: abiword-dev@abisource.com
> Subject: Re: Screenshots: Microsoft Word Spelling and Grammar dialog
> [WordPerfect]
>
>
> Alan Horkan wrote:
> > If anyone has a copy of Word Perfect I'd love to see how they do Grammar
> > checking
>
> I made some screenshots using WordPerfect 8 on Windows 95. I'm not sure
> what newer versions of WP look like, but this'll give us some idea of
> what they did.
>
> http://andyland.ca/abiword-wp8-grammar/
>
> There are shots of spelling and grammar checkers, both the "active"
> checkers that work while typing and the "standalone" checkers that need
> to be activated. I've tried to include shots that also show some of the
> options that are available, and I took a picture of the thesaurus (just
> because WP includes it in the overall grammar/spelling section).

I'm glad they spilt the grammar and spelling into seperate tabs rather
than trying to overload and dynamically change the buttons like Microsoft
did (an accessibility disaster I'm sure).

I'd rather avoid the tab based approach. Given that Abiword could
potentially be using various different backends I think a seperate dialog
will provide much needed room for flexibility.

Although grammar check is similar to spellchecking I don't think it is a
good idea to munge it together like Microsoft have done and I hope the
abiword developers will resist that temptation.

Martin is of course completely correct about needing to understand the
specific functionality available in Link before trying to design an
interface for it.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan
http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/
Received on Sun Feb 13 00:24:54 2005