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."

Comments

Usefulness?

[dada21]

Yay for F/OSS bloatware! (No offense to the poster)

Now if only they could have a floating thumb tack that gives you help whenever you don't need it.

Do people honestly use grammar check? Hasn't it been proven that no grammar checker works well enough to provide a wide cover of the English language?

Personally, when I write an article or something for wide dissemination, I'll send it to a group of writers I know and trust. Peer editing. They do the same when they need a human review. I'm sure there are websites to help others do similar swaps.

The MS Word g/c pisses me off bigtime. I have to disable it or go crazy.

For me, a grammar check is a bloat feature that doesn't add worth to a word processor. This is especially true for technical documents.

Is this a feature needed solely to promote the package (like the "often used" cruise control on every car) to the masses?

I'd rather have a thin distribution that works quickly without consuming massive amounts of RAM and processing power.

Am I alone?

Re:Usefulness?

[free space]

A grammar checker would be a good idea if:
- It is well implemented, from what I hear, Wordperfect's Grammatik used to be almost always correct and very useful,as opposed to Word's grammar checker that 's here just so that Microsoft can say "we have a grammar checker"

- It didn't try to 'improve your style'. I hate it whenever Word tries to encourage me not to use passive.Also my pet hate when Word underlines all my headers and says "fragment: consider revising" ...what the heck you dumb program! It's a freaking header! must all my headers be complete sentences?

- It can be easily turned off, and doesnt fill your page with green lines under every sentence.

it won't be as good as peer review or a professional proofreader, but it may spot that embarrasing mistake before you send that critical report to the customer at 11 pm..

Re:Usefulness?

[iangoldby]

As someone else already pointed out, you could say "The window broke." If you wanted to stress that windows don't just break on their own, you would say "Someone broke the window." Or you could say "The window has been broken for 3 weeks" if the length of time was your emphasis. In that case you are using the passive for a reason. (I only said it is Evil(TM), not that you should never use it.) It all depends on context.

Re:Usefulness?

[free space]

Thanks for the Orwell article, guy is a genius :)

I agree with you on the evil of excessive use of passive ( and more so on the unreadablity of moderm scientific papers!).There is is no denying that clear,specific writing is very important.

My problem with Word, however, is that it behaves towards writing style like the automaton it is, assuming that every passive voice is evil and marking it for review and so on, so I spend half my time shutting false alarms instead of fixing real problems in the document.
Microsoft could have done better if it either:
1) Used some sort of AI to differentiate between bad style and what appears to be bad style. If you put a page of a Charles Dickens novel in Word, it will mark it as full of problems.Software companies can do better than that.

2) Allowed me to correct style problems in a less intrusive way, instead of distracting me with all those green lines. Maybe they could make a 'review' tab with all the grammar errors in the document , grouped by type and sorted by severity.

3) Just stopped checking the styles and let me judge my work or get someone to review it.I know it can be turned off, but my point was why provide it if it wasn't satisfactory in the first place.

Re:Usefulness?

[amliebsch]

X is carrying the food. (Where X is the food carrier.)

Note this is why passive voice is disfavored; it is often unnecessarily ambiguous.

Re:Usefulness?

[Krach42]

More accurately to the point. The sentence "Something broke the window." implies that the writer doesn't even know what broke the window. While, "The windows was broken." Indicates that they have an idea of what broke it, but it's not important. And in a process report would indicate that the action was perhaps even part of the process. Compare:

In testing the VeloMatic A, the test unit was placed in the restraint system in front of the window, then as the test concluded, the window was broken.

With:

In testing the VeloMatic A, the test unit was placed in the restraint system in front of the window, then as the test concluded, something broke the window.

There's god damn nothing wrong with the Passive Voice except that it has a stigmatic notion in English. In German, it has a air of respectability to it over the active voice. Thus, in German if you want to sound more respectable, you use the passive more.

I spoke with my Dad on this topic once. He worked on process documents and reports. The idea is that you put everything in the passive, because the agents of the senteces are not to be indicated. You don't write "Bob strapped the VeloMatic A into the restraint system." no. You don't say who did what, it doesn't matter who did what, just that it was done. "The VeloMatic A was strapped into the restraint system."

Re:Usefulness?

[Krach42]

First, "The window broke" only works because "to break" is a dual-use transitive/intransitive. Not every word in English is like this. "The unit was strapped in." Please make *that* into an active sentence.

Oh, and don't use "someone" or "something", because both of those restrict the actor to either animate, or inanimate, while my sentence doesn't make any such restriction. Also, they create a greater air of uncertainty as to the agent of the sentence. "Someone strapped the unit in." makes it sound like, "I came into the lab, and someone had already strapped the unit in." Not, "As according to the process, the unit was strapped in."

Also, "The window has been broken for 3 weeks." *is* a passive sentence. The past perfect for "to be" (is) is "to have been" (has been). Thus, "I am a programmer." and "I have been a programmer for 3 weeks." Changing the tense of the sentence to make it seem like it's not a passive sentence shouldn't count for making it non-passive.

The passive isn't any less or more ambiguous than every setence that we use in English. It just has a bad rep, because stylistic perscriptionists declare that you should't use it. Meanwhile, in German, the perscriptivists *suggest* the passive, because it's an uncommon usage form that takes the tone of the sentence out of the "everyday".

Re:Usefulness?

[Dolda2000]

X is carrying the food. (Where X is the food carrier.)

Note this is why passive voice is disfavored; it is often unnecessarily ambiguous.

But maybe that's the point? Saying that "X is carrying the food" places too much focus on the fact that it is X, and not Y, that is carrying the food, when the fact that you want to communicate is that the food is being carried.

Compare these two sentences: "X tested Y for Z" and "Y was tested for Z". Can you reasonably tell me that the second sentence will not communicate the real meaning more efficiently?

-1 flamebait

[bluGill]

The GPL discourages collaboration. If you want to encourage collaboration you need a license like BSD. The GPL allows restricted collaboration, but only between GPL fans. The BSD license allows collaboration for everyone.

Re:-1 flamebait

[sonamchauhan]

...hence proving the grandparent poster's point.

Also, OO.org is LGPL and LinkGrammer has a BSD-ish license that allows free commercial use:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=165404&cid=137 97609

Re:-1 flamebait

[horza]

The GPL discourages collaboration. If you want to encourage collaboration you need a license like BSD. The GPL allows restricted collaboration, but only between GPL fans. The BSD license allows collaboration for everyone.

If you are feeling altrustic, then BSD allows maximum freedom for your code. If you want the world to benefit from your code, but don't want someone ripping off your work and hiding it in a commercial project without paying you anything, then GPL gives you great protection. Even after you release something under the GPL you can still license it to a commercial closed-source enterprise for a fee, like MySQL. It only becomes a nuisance when the project grows and has many contributers as you then need to ask permission from each contributer before you can relicense. On the flip side BSD encourages more forking where the new code is not merged back into the main tree as there is no incentive. If the appropriate license is chosen then I don't think either will encourage collaboration more than the other as the license should reflect the goal of the project. A group writing printer drivers which their respective companies have agreed to make Open Source for pragmatic reasons may not want the same license as a loosely-knit group of graphics programmers wanting to release 3D modelling system. There are plenty of other licenses that can be used, though GPL, BSD and Apache licences currently have the greatest mind-share. There is no such thing as a best license, only the most appropriate one.

Phillip.

Re:-1 flamebait

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are feeling altrustic, then BSD allows maximum freedom for your code.

Well, public domain allows maximum freedom for your code. If you want credit (in the source), there's MIT style licenses (the Boost license is a nice one), and if you also don't want people to use (without permission) your name to advertise their product that uses your code, there's BSD.

If you want the world to benefit from your code, but don't want someone ripping off your work and hiding it in a commercial project without paying you anything, then GPL gives you great protection.

That's assuming you'd feel ripped off if someone used your code in a commercial project without paying you, of course.

On the flip side BSD encourages more forking where the new code is not merged back into the main tree as there is no incentive.

For that matter, there's no insentive per se to merge things back with GPL either. You have to make the modifications available (assuming you released the modified binaries), but you don't have to merge.

Re:-1 flamebait

[Anonymous Coward]

You sir, are an idiot.

The GPL is a warped perspective of "free". Is software truly free if you have to distribute any changes you make to it? This certainly sounds like a restriction to me.

"The GPL is restrictive! You should have the freedom to take away people's freedom or else you don't truly have freedom!"

So writing your own code and not showing it to someone else is taking away someone else's freedom? If you write your own code, you should have the choice to decide whether or not you want to distribute it. The GPL takes away this choice, restricting your freedom to do what you want with the code.

BSD does not step on anyone else's freedom, it makes code truly free. The GPL is for zealots who think nobody should be able to code for profit.

And before you say profitting from code means it is not free, that is not true. The code distributed under the BSD license is still free, more so than with the GPL, but if someone adds proprietary code that they are free to add, then they do not have to distribute their non-free modifications, but the original BSD licensed code is STILL free.

Grammar checker? No thanks

[g_dunn]

Even advanced grammar checkers still work very poorly compaired to sitting down, reading it yourself, and then having an english inclined friend do the same.

I suppose LaTeX support is nice for the math geeks, though you would think that they are already using a program with support for it if they need it.

Re:Grammar checker? No thanks

[Coryoth]

I suppose LaTeX support is nice for the math geeks, though you would think that they are already using a program with support for it if they need it.

I am a math geek, and unsurprisingly I do indeed use LaTeX. I am quite happy to see the TeX style math support in AbiWord though: not for me, but for others. As a math geek I read a lot of math, and seeing the ugly, badly rendered, hard to read, amateurish garbage produced by some word processors pains me. I'm realistic though. There are a lot of people who only need a little math and aren't going to learn how to write documents in LaTeX just for that. To have someting like AbiWords new equation editing is a good thing: it doesn't render quite as well as LaTeX, but it is streets ahead MS Word and nicer than OO.o currently manages: it's actually somewhat readable.

Personally I would prefer people use this OO.o macro which allows embedding of rendered LaTeX in an editable way, but to be fair you still need to know a little LaTeX to really be ale to use it (unlike AbiWord's offering).

Jedidiah.

Re:Grammar checker? No thanks

[ndogg]

Grammar checkers are nice for catching the stupid mistakes like "We can
can do this..."

Eh?

[DrXym]

OpenOffice is LGPL'd and makes use of Mozilla, Java, Python and no doubt a large swathe of other libs and utilities. I don't see how the licence has been an impediment thus far.

I'd be more concerned that if it were GPL'd that it couldn't use some or all of the above. Now arguably, OO does need to shed some pounds so if it dumped Python and / or Java that might be no bad thing, but that's a different topic altogether.

But which will be first to...

[Eric Smith]

...have a GOOD grammar checker?

Grammar check is perhaps a misnomer

[Julian Morrison]

Actual uses of grammar check:

- As a partner to spell check, find correctly spelled but misplaced words (eg: there and their).

- Find common brain-farts such as reduplicated words.

- Remind blame-ducking idiots that the passive verb makes their evasions obvious. Mistakes were made, my foot!

- Point out incongruities and neologisms, which some people might not know aren't cultured english, such as excessive verbing of nouns.

These are all tasks that require an ability to parse grammar, and they're actually useful.To call them "grammar checking" would be too strong, but I can't think of a better descriptive name.

Re:When will Abiword support OpenDocument?

[Nadir]

2.4 supports import of OpenDocument: from http://www.abiword.com/release-notes/2.4.0.phtml:

OpenDocument support

Support for the OpenDocument file format has been donated by INdT, Nokia's Technology Institute. Currently the OpenDocument import filter is basically complete, with support for styles, headers/footers, lists, image wrapping, text boxes, tables, footnotes/endnotes and tables of contents. OpenDocument export is planned as well and will be added during the 2.4.x series.

Since AbiWord is Open Source...

[mh101]

...any chance of integrating the grammar-checking code into Slashdot? Or would the code melt-down from an overload after being installed here for more than 5 minutes?

Re:Equation Editing

[idlake]

OOo and (La)TeX are similarly efficient in terms of input. But (La)TeX is the de-facto standard; there is no reason to use anything else.

They should use use their own grammar checker

[toonrmeusa]

"We can can do this because we're a pure GPL'd application" (my italics).

Nice to see

[93 Escort Wagon]

I'm glad to see Abiword getting some attention. I've always preferred it (and it's natural associate, Gnumeric) to OpenOffice. They're faster, more responsive, and IMO just plain do a better job than OO.

Abiword has a native Aqua port as well (wish Gnumeric did).

Re:LaTeX

[Cunk]

The main point of the article is that Abiword has more potential than OpenOffice because it can be more easily extended with other GPL projects. He only mentions grammar checking and LaTeX as specific examples.

grammar checkers, bah!

[mysticgoat]

An english grammar checker in OpenOffice will be useful when the english language acquires a good grammar. I don't see that happening for quite a while. In over 400 years of "modern english", it hasn't happened yet.

In fact, since the number of people who now speak english as a second language greatly exceeds the number of native english speakers, the diversity of acceptable english expression is increasing. English has always been very open to importing new sentence structures as well as vocabulary from other sources. English is a healthy growing language, that is changing almost from year to year as it absorbs and transmogrifies what these new english speakers bring to the party.

Ehwww

[lastberserker]

That's quite ugly, don't you think? Here is a TeX version to compare (kudos to Wikipedia's TeX renderer)