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AbiWord beats OpenOffice to a Grammar Checker
msevior writes "The recently released AbiWord-2.4 (downloads for Linux, OSX and Windows here ) is the first Free Word Processor to offer an integrated Grammar Checker. We can can do this because we're a pure GPL'd application and so can easily collaborate with other Freely licensed applications like link-grammar, gtkmathview and itex2mml which provide AbiWord-2.4 with a superb Latex-based Math feature.
Sun's license requirements for OpenOffice.Org make it much more difficult for such collaborations to occur."
I agree.
However, I use ABIword as my primary word processor. It loads faster in both Windows and Linux (for me), it consumes less memory, and the interface is a decent clone of Word, so that others have fewer problems with it when they use my machine.
so... its benefits outweigh its problems for me.
Think for yourself. Question Authority.
From the Link Grammer link you provided:
http://bobo.link.cs.cmu.edu/link/
As of December 2004, we are releasing the parser under a new license; the license allows unrestricted use in commercial applications, and is also compatible with the GNU GPL (General Public License). You can view the license here. We are also releasing version 4.1b, which is identical to version 4.1 (released in 2000) except that the licensing statements reflect the new license.
Sun's license for OpenOffice is LGPL
http://www.openoffice.org/license.html
While theoretically correct, the practice is different: everyone is allowed to collaborate when the software has a BSD license. However, since it is not mandatory to publish the code, it really doesn't matter that much.
3 3 ]
...and therefore:
For example, the ASUS WL-500g (Linksys like router with USB port) its firmware is recompilable and hackable by you and me since it is (mainly) GPLed code. The newer SL1000/SL5000 (vpn routers) contain several BSD modules which ruin the party:
[From: http://website.wl500g.info/beta/firmware.php?fid=
Changelog:
SL1000 and SL500 GPL source code
Before using the source code, please note:
1. The router's firewall and VPN are licensed 3rd party code and are not subjected to GPL terms.
2. Several software modules are derived from BSD codes, which ASUS won't release.
[From: http://wl500g.info/showthread.php?t=3417 ]
There are no chance to build something useful from this sources.
Do you drive much on the highway? If so, I don't see how you could disparage the use of cruise control; there's nothing I hate more than someone floating between two different speeds, 20 km/h apart, and it's not like cruise control makes you a worse driver or something. Although for the average commuter, it's useless, it is crucial for the many 5-hour-plus drives I make.
The submitter praises GNOME's premier word processor in that it can surpass OpenOffice.org because it is GPL'ed, whereas the inflexible LGPL license of OpenOffice.org cripples development.
No, I think you (and most posters) misunderstand what the licensing issue is. The problem with OpenOffice.org is *not* that it's LGPL'd, but rather that for code to be integrated into OpenOffice.org, Sun requires you turn your copyright over to Sun. Very few existing Open Source projects are willing to do that--because frankly it's evil. This makes it very difficult for OpenOffice.org to integrate anything that isn't home grown.
Another great program for those that want nice equations (and nice documents in general) is LyX, which is essentially a GUI for building LaTeX. It has its own document format, but it compiles to TeX in order to generate output. As a college student I think it's great for quickly throwing together homework assignments with a mixture of text, equations, figures and code samples (I end up using it quite a bit in DSP classes). I don't think you really *have* to know anything about TeX to use LyX, unless you have specific requirements about how your document looks (for example, for courses in the humanities where I have to use MLA format... there's a LaTeX MLA package that I ended up having to modify becaue it was incorrect, and to use it within LyX you need to know a bit about how TeX works).
Have you tried 2.4? Each release includes tons of bug fixes in addition to the features that we tout. In fact, if you don't install the grammar checking and other new plugins, the core of AbiWord has had many improvements on its own.
Disclaimer: I'm the Win32 packager for AbiWord.
I recognize people by their sigs. Is that a bad thing?
Maybe you should take a peek at the package... Grammar Checking and Math Editing support are added as plugins. Most distributions provide plugins seperately, and if they don't you can just generally remove the plugin file. On Windows, the installer allows you to select precisely which plugins you want, when you get the separate plugin installers. We understand that part of the appeal of AbiWord is its small size and speed, and we won't comprimise that.
As others have pointed out, a grammar check makes a good companion to a spell check. It's of course not for everyone, but there are many more users of AbiWord than you (and from reading your posting, I wonder if you even gave it a shot), and many of those users would like one. If you want a grammar check, you can install it. If you don't, you can leave it out. How does this not please the greatest number of users?
Have you tried 2.4? Each release includes tons of bug fixes in addition to the features that we tout. In fact, if you don't install the grammar checking and other new plugins, the core of AbiWord has had many improvements on its own.
Disclaimer: I'm the Win32 packager for AbiWord.
I recognize people by their sigs. Is that a bad thing?
The FSF also requires you to assign your copyright to them if you contribute to some of their projects (such as emacs -- I know; I've contributed to emacs). And you have to sign a document saying that your work is your own, and that you have the right to assign copyright to them (i.e. your employer has no claim over the code). This is to make sure that any code that goes in is legit, or at least that if they get sued for copying someone's code, they can point to the document and say that it wasn't their fault.
Of course, the free software community trusts the FSF a lot more than than they trust Sun.
To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three persons, two of them absent.
Been there, done that:
.html
http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/tpop/Markov.java
Although this (short) program uses these state tables in order to spew out superficially good looking english text.
For example output, state table from:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/02/magazine/02freak
Twenty-five hundred tons. That's how much manure was produced every day and tries to keep all three of you
from experiencing that telltale soft smush of a police captain, argued her dog-poop case. "While adults like
yourselves are appalled and disgusted by the sight of the Hoboken City Council, Lauren Mecka, the daughter of
a nuisance than horse manure ever was. But if you are, say, a parent who walks two kids to school every day
and tries to keep all three of you from experiencing that telltale soft smush of a nuisance nonetheless. With
horses, the solution was simply to eliminate guns has proved extremely difficult. A given gun lasts a very long
time, and as with dogs, guns are widely loved. But getting rid of the manure went uncollected, which posed a
terrible problem. (This is to say nothing of the uncollected dog poop in his sneaker tread linked him to the real
problem - their poop doesn't just lie there, of course. In 1978, New York were licensed. Even though a license
is legally required, costs a mere $8.50 a year and can be easily obtained by mail, most dog owners do obey the
law. That still leaves 10,000 dogs whose poop is found on the second floor so that homeowners might rise
above it. Like so many cells, poop is left in public spaces each day. Over the last year, only 68 summonses were
issued in New York enacted its famous (and widely imitated) "pooper scooper" law, and the offender's feelings
of guilt - are at least as powerful as financial and legal incentives. If social forces get us most of the animal dung
produced in today's New York enacted its famous (and widely imitated) "pooper scooper" law, and with them
went their dung. Most of the dogs? It might help for a moment to think of a misstep, it is a nuisance
nonetheless. With horses, the solution was simply to eliminate guns has proved extremely difficult. A given gun
lasts a very long time, and as with dogs, guns are widely loved. But getting rid of guns in crimes. Consequently,
the most recent year on record, only 102,004 dogs in New York neighborhood confirms that compliance with
the occasional miscreant who fails to scoop? After all, a walk through just about any New York City for
unlicensed dogs. So even if the DNA solution. During a meeting last year of the horse urine, the deafening
clatter of hooves or the carcasses left to rot in the late 19th century. Much of the dogs? It might cost about $30
million is a good guess.) All their poop doesn't just lie there, of course. In 1978, New York is not so much with
dogs per se. So perhaps attending to the real problem - their poop - will prompt a solution. Here's an idea:
DNA sampling. During the licensing procedure, every dog will have to provide a sample of saliva or blood to
establish a DNA sample for all the dogs of New York's dogs licensed? Instead of charging even a nominal fee,
the city may want to pay people to license their dogs. And then, instead of treating the licensing law as optional,
enforce it for real. Setting up random street checks for dog licenses may offend some New Yorkers, but it
certainly dovetails nicely with the law is hardly complete. The Parks Department, meanwhile, which conducts
regular cleanliness checks of parks and sidewalks," she said, "it is children like myself and younger who run the
greater risk of contact and exposure. We're the ones who have our picnics, stage our adventures and carry out
our dragon-slaying fantasies on our parks' grassy lawns. The council, Mecka says today, didn't seem to be
vigorously enforced. Let's pre
The grammar checker is a separate, add-on plugin, and it's actually rather small. On large documents, it does take a while to check the whole thing, but as another poster mentioned, it's completely optional.
Since you're using Windows, if you want to try it out, it's in the Tools plugin installer.
I recognize people by their sigs. Is that a bad thing?
All I can say in response is that there are a great many almost unreadable scientific papers out there that are over-wordy, constructed portacabin-like from pre-fabricated sentences, which contain nothing to keep the reader engaged.
I disagree, it's the content that keeps one engaged in those academic papers. If you're interested in an experiment you're going to read it anyway, and you're going to be thankful it's written in a methodical manner. I don't need any literary flourishes in my materials and methods section. Academic writing is the way it is because it is functional and efficiant.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I'm not ending a sentence with a preposition. I'm ending the sentence with an additional word that follows the verb, which just happens to look identical to a preposition. I'm not using the verb: "to strap" and then a preposition of "in" + some location. I'm using the verb "to strap in". Compare: "I strapped in the car." This does *not* mean, "I was strapping, and the location of that strapping was in the car." It means "I took the car, and strapped it in."
This confusion has been propogated by Prescriptionists for no bloody reason, except maybe that Latin didn't do it, or something like that. But fact is that Germanic languages are often known to use seperable and inseperable affixes to their verbs. German and Dutch are most apparent, because they're V2, thus the word "aufsteigen" (to climb up) is generally written together, but then in a sentence it become "ich steige auf." (I climb up.) Here the "preposition" auf is placed at the end of the sentence. So, I hear you "yeah, whatever, this is German, it's not English."
Well, let's move to Swedish, on the other side of the Germanic Language tree, and you'll see that while they don't have the words directly affixed, they are still considiered averbial suffixes. Example: "klättra uppför". (to climb up) Here the verb infinitive is "klättra", and the suffix is "uppför", you can't drop that suffix without changing the semantic meaning of the sentence. It's "Jag klättrar uppför" (I climb up), that's how it's used, and "uppför" is not a preposition at the end of a sentence, it's a suffix to the verb.
Now, while we have all these complex verbal phrases out there like "to strap in" and "to climb up". It's interesting to note that English shows the same features as all of the other Germanic languages: adverbial affixes that look exactly the same as a preposition. It's easily demonstrable that it's the German verbal system. Prescriptionists just don't listen to Linguists though, they listen to their damned style manuals that don't take much more than a surface examination of the language and attempt to dictate reason upon it.
Learning foreign languages you begin to learn that all that crap that Prescriptionists tell you is wrong, is actually done in other languages all around the world, in fact to the perscription of their own language guidelines! So, while English Prescriptionists are telling you "don't use double negatives, because it means the opposite of what you're trying to say," there are major languages out there that "violate" this logic. And when they say "don't end a sentence with a preposition", they neglect evidence shown by other languages that these are not prepositions, they're adverbial affixes to the verb. And when they say "don't split infinitives" they don't know what the hell they're talking about because there isn't a way to put another word between the "b" and "e" in "be", which is the real infinitive. ("I can see." Where's the infinitive in that sentence? "see", not "to see", German and Swedish follow the same rules about when you say "to verb" or "zu verb" or "att verb" respectively, but you don't see them saying that it's part of their infinitive.)
Note, that these three rules are slowly growing out of merit among perscriptionists, because they're starting to realize that hey, linguists actually know what they're talking about, and can make a rational explanation for this feature of natural speech. The only one they keep is double negatives, saying that "agreement of negation should not be done with negative words, but rather with indefinite words, as this is the established formal standard." Which is true.
But you still won't see those elementary school teachers, who are stupid, changing their deeply rooted opinions on this matter.
I am unamerican, and proud of it!
A good academic writing style can serve to make the content clearer and more appealing than the "methodical" manner that gets taught at my school, and it can do so without sacrificing scientific rigor.
Not everyone who is a great scientist is a great author. Academic writing as it is is easy to write, easy to read, and precise. If it's a little boring, well that's why you get paid. I'd like to see some examples of what you think is better, and you think can be replicated by any researcher.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Some fool will most likely suggest grammar and spell checking for slashdot - whatever colours your aluminium gauge will not apply to everyone here - "she" instead of "they" appears to be acceptable grammar in the USA but just looks confusing to the rest of us, so a grammar checker will vary.