Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Fixes in Sonnet

As we all know inner beauty is the most important kind of beauty. Especially if you're ugly. Not ugly, don't sue me, I meant to say "easy on the eyes challenged". That's one of the reasons I like working on frameworks and libraries. It's the appeal of improving the inner beauty of certain things. I gave up on trying to improve the inner beauty of myself (when I was about 1) so this is the most I can do.

You can do it too. It's real easy. I took this week off because I'm going to Germany for SVG Open where I'll talk about SVG in KDE and today fixed a few irritating bugs in Sonnet.

One of the things that bugged me for a while was the fact that we kept marking misspelled text as red instead of using the God given red squiggly underline. Well, I say no more!
Our spelling dialog lists available dictionaries now and one can change them on the fly. That's good. Raspberries good. And raspberries are pretty darn good. Even sheep like raspberries. Or so I think, the only sheep I've ever seen was from a window of a car and it looked like an animal who enjoys raspberries. Who doesn't? The only problem was that it liked listing things like "en_GB-ise" or "en_GB-ize-w_accents" as language names which is really like a nasty bug in the raspberry. And what do you with bugs? I'm not quite certain myself but given the way this blog is heading it's surely something disturbing... Anywho. that's also fixed. Now we list proper and readable names. As in:

Working on Sonnet is a lot of fun. A small change in a pretty small library affects the entire KDE which is rather rewarding. So if you wanted to get into KDE development in an easy and fun way go to https://bugs.kde.org search for "kspell" or "sonnet" pick an entry and simply fix it!

16 comments:

Anonymous said...

I would much rather see:

English (Australia)

than

English (Philippines)

But, hey, you can't have everything. Nice work Zack.

Anonymous said...

Thanks a lot Zack this always bugged me because I thought what if I want to use that color for the words? than I'm screwed! It never happened but still.

Ariya Hidayat said...

Yay! Who doesn't love squiggly line? :-D

Anonymous said...

What is odd, is the lack of progress on font rendering. Looking at Zack's screenshot, fonts just suck and look just like they would in a KDE3 screenshot.

Anonymous said...

thank you very mutch
i realy heated that the spelling errors were only marked in red couse i have a big problem with color blindnes

Anonymous said...

any ideas how i can add not just plain words to my personal .aspell.*.pws? would be nice to add word-parts that can be combined with others etc.

Anonymous said...

Is the squiggly line configurable? I think it interferes too much with whatever is below the base line. Maybe fine for English but you don't want any language with accents below letters.

Anonymous said...

@Anonymous: The lack of progress in font rendering you describe may have to do with the display you're using. a setup that looks nice on one display might look bad on another. So you cannot judge the quality of font rendering by looking at screenshots.

Kevin Kofler said...

"pick an entry and simply fix it!" - Does that include my patch to add Hunspell support to K3Spell? I don't want to commit it without any feedback, but I got none. :-(

And what about my backports to KDE 3 (Hunspell for KSpell and Enchant (which includes Hunspell support) for KSpell2)?

We have been shipping all those patches in Fedora for a while, they work fine.

As for the readable language names, the drawback is that some combinations are lost. E.g. what's the exact equivalent of en_GB-ize-w_accents in the readable scheme? What if you don't want accents? Etc. And what Enchant backend(s) have you tested the feature with?

Anonymous said...

en_GB-ize-w_accents is obviously "English (British, -ize, with accents)"

The fonts look fine except for some strange white bits around some letters (e.g. the W's). Could be due to sub-pixel hinting or something.

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Unknown said...

Your missing Whish off your list of suggestions:

Main Entry:
Pronunciation:\ˈhwish, ˈwish\
Function:verb
Etymology: imitative
Date: 1518

transitive verb : to urge on or cause to move with a whish intransitive verb 1 : to make a sibilant sound 2 : to move with a whish especially at high speed 'an elevator…whishes down to the lower level — Natalie Cooper'

Anonymous said...

Those fonts look a bit better than on my laptop running os x, but I guess we may have different screens, making screenshots useless for comparison.

Anonymous said...

Language+country names in the combobox feature was available in kspell2/sonnet since 2006. Here is the reference.

http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-core-devel&m=114220838306343&w=2

Or am I missing something?

Mashrab.

JohnFlux said...

Is there a right-click context menu for the misspelt words?

Kevin Kofler said...

@behavedave: Missing suggestions are not Sonnet's fault, but the spelling library's (e.g. hunspell, aspell etc.).