Re: Raster's typing - was Re: gtkstep info

[Nat Friedman <ndf ALEPH1 MIT EDU>]

On Sat, Sep 19, 1998 at 06:04:18PM -0400, Soren Harward wrote:
> NO!!!!! NO!NO!NO!NO!NO!NO!NO!
> 
> "Autocorrect" spelling is one of the WORST things even invented for word
> processors.  It's far less annoying to put a noticable but unobtrusive

It is a shame that the set of all typo correctors has been damned by
Microsoft Autocorrect's annoying behavior.  I can only assume that
this is what you are referring to, since I have never used any other
automatic typo corrector but my own and Microsoft's.

> marking near the word (like MS's little red underline) and let you fix it
> manually than to try to fix it automatically.  There are too many words in
> and language that are just so close that they can't be differentiated
> accurately.  If we had autocorrect everywhere, I'd have to teach ever
> single word processor I use that "Soren" should not be replaced by
> "Sarin."  I don't like being a toxic nerve gas associated with terrorists.

My typo corrector would not replace "Soren" with "Sarin" because 'o'
and 'a' are not very close on the keyboard, and neither are 'i' and
'e'.  I don't even know what a Sarin is, to be honest, and so "Sarin"
would probably not replace "Soren" even if 'a' and 'o' were close,
since "Sarin" would probably not be in my typo corrector's lexicon.

If it is an annoying feature, then I am confident that application
authors will either have it turned off by default or just not bother
to include it.

Cheers,
-Nat