Subject: Re: Feature Request - Grammar Checker
From: robin (robin@bilkent.edu.tr)
Date: Wed Sep 12 2001 - 15:29:54 CDT
Steve wrote:
>
> First off I wish to thank you for all your hard work developing a great
> product.
I concur. I don't use Abiword very often, as I'm more of a LaTeX
person, but I'm impressed, and I find it useful when I need to read Word
documents and don't want to wait for OpenOffice to load up ;-)
> One feature however which I find is lacking in a lot of
> open-source wordprocessors but is very much needed is a grammar checker.
> Being a writer, personally I consider this to be an invalueble feature
> for editing purposes. If possible could you please include a grammar
> checking in an upcoming version of Abiword.
Please don't!
Grammar checkers are at best irritating and at worst misleading. In the
days when I used MS Word, I would sometimes turn on the grammar checker
for amusement. Frequently it would mark sentences as ungrammatical which
I was convinced were perfectly normal English. Given that I have a
degree in English and an MA in linguistics, I'm fairly sure my knowledge
of grammar can hold its own in a fight against a grammar checker.
Until we have genuine AI, grammar checkers will be unfeasible, for the
simple reason that computers cannot guess a writer's intentions. For
example, anyone reading this list will know that if I write (classic
example) "Time flies like an arrow", the sentence doesn't have the same
grammar as "Fruit flies like a banana". To a computer, they are
syntactically identical.
More to the point, the philosophy of Abiword, as I understand it, is to
concentrate on the most necessary features and avoid bloat. Maybe when
Abiword has essential features like tables, we can think about producing
Abiword++ with grammar checkers, thesauri and the like.
Robin
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