Actually, it is. At first, I was trying to figure out how they got by
without having a "Change to" field (which older spell dialogs all used to
have). As you suggest, making the dialog modeless so you can leave it and
then resume would be an obnoxious pain.
Then I tried typing in the preview. It just works. :-)
After some more investigation, it became clear that they've put an editable
sentence preview there which even honors character-level formatting. That's
definitely too much work for now, but it'll make a pretty cool project later
on for someone who wants to implement an editable mini-view.
>That's fine. In fact, I had noticed the Ignores on top, Changes on the
>bottom design in Word, but then forgot about it when placing the buttons.
>I can switch these around very easily.
Cool. I'll hold off on implementing the Windows version of this dialog
until early next week, to give you some time to polish up whatever details
you'd like.
>Labelling? Do you mean the exact wording on the dialog?
>That's really not important to me. If you prefer it uses slightly
>different phrases/words/etc, that's fine.
Since so many of our potential users already expect things to be phrased a
particular way, it's probably a good idea to avoid gratuitous differences
unless we really come up with something better.
>It wasn't from a desire to avoid a second dialog, as I expect we'll need
>that dialog anyway, to allow the user to select which dictionaries to
>actually search, and eventually, allow the user to tweak the behavior of
>the underlying spell checking code (ignore captials, ignore words with
>numbers, etc).
Yep. There are TODOs in the code just waiting for those prefs options.
>The reason: I would use it.
Bingo. Scratching an itch is the *ideal* reason to add a feature. :-)
>I use Abiword for several separate but
>highly technical fields (such as computers, biochemistry, biophysics, etc)
>and I like to keep terminology from each separate. It would annoy me to
>have to open the dialog to set the default "add to" dictionary all the
>time.
Do you tend to use all those vocabularies in the same document? If so, then
I definitely understand where you're coming from, and it's probably a good
UI solution. Then the only issue is whether this should be a mainstream
feature for everyone, or an advanced power-user feature that's less
obtrusive. (For example, if people feel the combo takes up too much screen
real estate, another UI option would be a small button with a pull-right
arrow symbol which pops up a menu with the current dictionary checked.)
However, if you only tend to use one set of terminology per document, then
another way to handle this would be to add a document attribute called
"default dictionary" or something. (If the dictionary isn't present, we'd
just ignore it.)
>However, I guess most people are only going to use one personal
>dictionary, so it's rather pointless.
Yeah, the church secretary probably doesn't care.
>I'm not discouraged. I know the dialog I checked in is far from perfect.
Don't be too humble. What you've already got is *quite* sweet.
>I agree, and I have no problems with changing the dialog to help improve
>usability.
Cool. That's what I figured.
Remember though that "code wins", so now that I've raised these issues, I'm
going to try hard to quietly defer to your best judgment about your features
should work. Past this point, if I really feel passionate about something,
it's up to me to provide the necessary code in ways which don't step on your
toes. :-)
Paul