Re: [tdf-discuss] European Commitee enter talks with MS licences, Please make your action today against it.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On 05/04/2011 21:23, Robert Derman wrote:

> My prime example, the word list in the spell checker is PATHETIC!!! 

It is fairly easy to toss out the built in spell checker, and replace it
with something that is more suitable for your organization's usage.

> The only alternative is to consider the spell checker USELESS, and to
just permanently turn it off.

Earlier today I received a document that is an outline of some work to
be done.  Whilst the document is not legally binding, it is the legal
foundation of a potential contract. However, there were at least half a
dozen words in it, that their spell checker did not flag as incorrect,
but whose meaning would radically change the work I'd be doing.

Until I queried them about those phrases, they hadn't realized that what
the document said, and what they meant were radically different things.
The reason they didn't realize that, was that nobody had bothered to
manually spell check the document.  They automatically accepted the
corrections their spell checker made, without considering that the spell
checker was offering up words that were almost 180 degrees in meaning,
to the intended word.

My point: All spell checkers are useless, unless one is also manually
checking both the spelling and the grammar of the document.

> Naturally we cannot purchase a word list to use,

With LibO and OOo your options are:
* Create your own word list;
* Purchase a word list from a vendor;
* Use a word list that is distributed gratis;

There are places other than the OOo and LibO website that offer
dictionaries, extensions, and other things for OOo and LibO.

> because anything sold would be copyrighted and therefore useless to us.

Assuming that a word list can be copyrighted, which is a debatable
issue, at least under US Copyright law, why would it being sold preclude
your organization from using it?

> understand there is no Open Source or other non copyright word list that is sufficiently better 
> than what we are now using to be worth bothering with. 

There are roughly one billion words in the English language. You could
have a LibO spell checker that contains each of those words.  However,
you probably would end up being in the same position as you currently
are in, because the word in the document is correctly spelled, but is
not the word with the meaning that was intended.

A word list that contains only the thousand or so most commonly
misspelled words in your organization, will probably catch more than 99%
of the spelling errors that are made.

Require all employees to manually spell check and grammar check all
content that is sent outside the organization.   (They should be doing
that anyway, but since spell checkers seem to be an issue....)

> I think if someone could tell some of us end users where to find our
own word lists that we have had to add hundreds or thousands of words
to, turn them into email attachments, and send them to LO,

Create and distribute that wordlist for internal usage.
Once it meets your organization's needs, you can distribute it to third
parties.  Or even offer it up as a LibO extension.

jonathon
- -- 
If Bing copied Google, there wouldn't be anything new worth requesting.

If Bing did not copy Google, there wouldn't be anything relevant worth
requesting.

                              DaveJakeman 20110207 Groklaw.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/

iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJNnFRyAAoJEERA7YuLpVrVu1MH/2EFe7hmRC3V436Ifgcd4FGn
LpSkRVRLwbX7VQzHJc5OenafSN5aeSFb+JIaoBd4EDbOhgGbSPCor7hsDPxb/YLh
GsQ8CEHCtnX4343OOTC8oaMNEew/TzW4t7VoznKS9biMEvfKAmi43XKtrHsOl3zz
OVxu/0Yo+ilEZG2KEHPrxJq7hiN2OM4UuLIqPT6OnvR5UYcg0hTojXf9j8xhzQn/
NZUMqAN7NgqpoCcMwW6vfaehLUeWb9CyY1EqtxL1SsmwlXoJyYd/z7NcsVx7cQtF
L4dLkrrfyiAK7COLn5zYO1yOo5Oeb21S5/JrUIiTR7ROCmE4PCRW3GyyIRxcwuU=
=Mqy9
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

-- 
Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to discuss+help@documentfoundation.org
Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette
List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/discuss/
All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted