Re: Spell checking component for GNOM

["Michael D. Crawford" <crawford goingware com>]

Check out:

The Word Services Suite
http://www.wordservices.org

The word services suite has been working to provide interapplication
spelling and grammar checking services on the MacOS and BeOS for some
years.  It's also used for such things as HTML validation and could be
used for text encryption for email.

It works really well, and is really easy to implement both from the
server and client side.

Once you've written a server (spellchecker) you can add it to all of
your clients (email clients and word processors) just by putting it on
your machine without any further development of the clients.

I've been working with this for years and understand all the issues very
well.

I'd like to bring this to Gnome.  I think it could be made to work just
great through the CORBA interfaces.  

On MacOS it uses Apple Events and the Apple Object Model, and on BeOS it
uses BMessages and the BeOS scripting API.  It uses the APIs for
scripting, but scripting itself is not used - what is used is a uniform
way of retrieving and replacing text from and into widgets that contain
text.  There's also a system for registering the services.

But I'm afraid I don't know much about programming Gnome.  I use Gnome
when I run Linux, and I program a number of other frameworks on other
OSes, but I haven't done much GUI development under XWindows at all.  To
get this to work under Gnome, I need the assistance of someone who's
more experienced with it than I.

If you're going to be doing spellchecking under Gnome, please do work
with me to bring Word Services to Gnome.

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting
http://www.goingware.com
crawford goingware com

   Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow.