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?

[elebrin]

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.

Re:Usefulness?

[Saven Marek]

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?

Well many other languages have much simpler or more strict grammars than english so it is relevant for those, and with localisation for other areas that isn't a problem. By that I mean that maybe it works brilliant for 90% of languages but sometimes english isn't the best for everything.

In this case it is some other language that gets the benefits.

Re:Usefulness?

[legirons]

It didn't try to 'improve your style'

You typed "colour". Would you like me to change it to "color"?

Re:Usefulness?

[iangoldby]

I hate it whenever Word tries to encourage me not to use passive.

You can turn this off you know. If I had MS Word installed on this machine I'd tell you how, but I don't think it is too obscure.

Personally, I find the grammer checker quite useful and I believe that the passive voice is Evil(TM). Most people who use passive seem to believe that they need to in order to take the focus away from the person doing the action, and that this is particularly important in scientific publications etc.

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. If that is the price of using the passive voice, then I don't think it is worth paying.

Can I recommend you take a look at George Orwell's essay Politics and the English Language ? Although written in 1946, he still has a lot that is relevant to say about writing clear and engaging english. (Sorry, I've gone off the original subject a little, but I think this essay should be required reading for anyone who does any kind of formal writing.)

Re:Usefulness?

[agraupe]

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.

Re:Usefulness?

[duffbeer703]

"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?"

Doing things such as writing complete sentences, not running on and avoiding using passive voice are useful if you would like people to read what you write and understanding it instead of throwing it in the trash.

easier to read sentence are. fragments more difficult. peer review doesn't always work. if your peers are just as poor.

Re:Usefulness?

[WilliamSChips]

Most people who use passive seem to believe that they need to in order to take the focus away from the person doing the action, and that this is particularly important in scientific publications etc.

Okay then, translate "The window has been broken" into active voice.

Re:Usefulness?

[Klivian]

Well many other languages have much simpler or more strict grammars than english so it is relevant for those, and with localisation for other areas that isn't a problem. By that I mean that maybe it works brilliant for 90% of languages but sometimes english isn't the best for everything. It's most probable to be the other way, making it even worse for non english languages. As it most likely are developed to work with english as the primary language, making it nearly impossible to localize to other languages.

Re:Usefulness?

[aklix]

Actually, Word's Autocorrect feature has come in handy for a High School Senior Prank. Other than that it's only good for capitalizing my I's. I'm not going to bash just m$, the word finishing feature of openoffice.org, who's idea was that? Overall though OOo is more stable than Word. After a SP2 upgrade I had to reinstall M$ Office. Not with OOo.

Re:Usefulness?

[God'sDuck]

Okay then, translate "The window has been broken" into active voice.

"Windows is broken."

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]

I agree with you on the importance of writing style. My problem with Word is that it's supicious of everything I write, even if it's perfectly readable.
Fragments are fine for things like newspaper headlines or technical documemtation, which is part of my job. It's bad that whenever I write something like "Unit Statistics" in its own line Word rushes out to correct me. A lot of minor annoyances like this make its grammar checker unusable, IMO.

Re:Usefulness?

[WilliamSChips]

Yes, that's exactly how passive perfect tenses are done in Latin. But can you do "The window is being broken"?

Re:Usefulness?

[gaj]

"The window breaks"?

Re:Usefulness?

[colinrichardday]

The window is breaking.

Re:Usefulness?

[legirons]

Yep, OpenOffice (and Word, etc.) would be a lot better if there were a single button to turn off the 132 different ways in which it can interfere with your work.

e.g. after you think you've deleted the whole list of autocorrect options, and there's still something making it capitalise the "For" in "for(1..10){}"

Re:Usefulness?

[WilliamSChips]

(I only said it is Evil(TM), not that you should never use it.)

The former often implies the latter, especially on slashdot. Mea culpa. And I agree that the passive is usually awkward and/or unneccessary, but Evil(TM) is a bit too harsh a word--Evil(TM) should be reserved for things like Microsoft, the DMCA, and software patents..

Re:Usefulness?

[Spacejock]

I use a grammar checker as a final-final catch for stupid mistakes like 'the the' and other extraneous words which a spell check won't find. Yes, some of the suggestions it makes are ridiculous, circular or just plain unnecessary, but a couple of times it's picked up one of my silly errors and that makes it all worthwhile.

Would I rely on a computer to correct and improve my grammar? No thanks. Ditto a spelling checker - I just use it for typos.

Re:Usefulness?

[afd8856]

I really like the autocomplete feature from OpenOffice. So much that when I need to write something more than a page I use Writer. Not everybody likes it, and it needs getting used to, but to me it seems that it really helps and speeds my typing. One of the better features is to have it act like a spell-checker, if, for example, your language doesn't have a dictionary.

Re:Usefulness?

[uncqual]

Besides, cruise control lets you catch a little sleep while you drive.

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?

[Dan_Bercell]

Its nice to send a document to a group to look over, however its not feasible for most of the documents written in business these days. Please dont forget more features are good, if you dont think so use old versions of word processors... One usefullness of Office is Outlook uses Word as its email editor, therefore you get the spell checker and grammar checkers... nice when you compose 30+ emails per day.

Re:Usefulness?

[WilliamSChips]

Dangit, I should have chosen a verb that doesn't have a verb equivelant to the passive form. Try "The food is being carried".

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?

[jonadab]

> 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

I seriously doubt it, although I have not seen that specific one. However, grammar is notoriously AI-complete, and I have a really hard time imagining that grammar checking is any better solved than translation.

The best grammar checkers available, as far as I am aware, are correct just about often enough to get a D in high school English class -- maybe a C if you stick to simple one-clause sentences (because the grammar checker can mostly handle the grammar on those, but you'll be severely downgraded for style).

There are only three reasons I can think of to use a grammar checker.

The most obvious reason is if your own knowledge of the language is really that bad (which, it seems, is true for a rather larger percentage of the populace than it is comfortable for me to contemplate at length).

Another reason would be if you are sending a document to someone (e.g., your boss or a business partner) and you know they are using a given piece of word processing software, which includes this feature; you might then want to use the same grammar checker so that you can "adjust" your grammar to match its peculiar ideas of correct usage and so avoid potentially-embarrassing green squigglies.

Finally, the *best* reason to use a grammar checker is for entertainment. It is marvelously entertaining to feed the poor innocent grammar checker excerpts of real (and well-written) literature and watch it raise hilariously spurious objections. (Always feed it good material, not bad writing; false negatives are much less entertaining than false positives.)

Personally I would like grammar checkers a lot better if they came with big red warning labels disclaiming any notions of accuracy.

Re:Usefulness?

[Fishead]

I hate Autocomplete. Not only does it encourage laziness, but it drives me crazy trying to guess what I am trying to type. Auto-correct is the same. I don't mind if it underlines my misspelled word, but if I don't have to go back and fix it, how is my spelling ever supposed to improve?

Re:Usefulness?

[1u3hr]

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?

I don't see that.. maybe you should use a "Heading" style for headings. Word does have styles, though it makes it almost impossible to use consistently by all the user-friendly second guessing it does. But using heading styles has other benefits; it lets you see the document in outline form, for instance.

Re:Usefulness?

[afd8856]

well, if you see that it guesses wrong, you can just continue typing. On the other hand, if your about to type a ten letters word, and on the fourth letter it guesses what you're trying to type, it save five or six keystrokes. Sometimes, even when I see that the word it guesses is a bit mistaken (another gramatical form of that word), I prefer to let it complete it and hit backspace to correct it. Seems faster to me.

Re:Usefulness?

[Anonymous Coward]

We can can do this because we're a pure GPL'd application

Well, it would have been useful for instance to check the submission for glaring errors.

Re:Usefulness?

[HermanAB]

Clearly, you have never used Corel WordPerfect. One of its strong points is a grammar checker that actually works. The sorry excuse for a grammar checker built into MS Word, is what convinced the world that it cna't be done. Just another example of MS Innovation (TM)... Cheers, Herman http://www.aerospacesoftware.com/linuxhowtos.html

Re:Usefulness?

[megabyte405]

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.

Re:Usefulness?

[WilliamSChips]

But what if we don't know what X is, which we often don't?

Re:Usefulness?

[iangoldby]

I think you just have to accept Word's grammar checker for what it is. I find that its main value is in encouraging me to make sure that I know why I broke that particular style rule. (It's not like a compiler where you generally want to clean up the code to eliminate all warnings.) I often use the passive without thinking about it. But any decision I make without knowing why I made that decision is not a free decision, and is quite possibly not a good decision either.

Re:Usefulness?

[1u3hr]

I use a grammar checker as a final-final catch for stupid mistakes like 'the the' and other extraneous words which a spell check won't find.

Interesting. Most spellchecks I use (eg, text editors) DO flag duplicate words; however I see Word's doesn't, presuambly because it's part of it's Grammar check as you said.

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?

[Metasquares]

I've always used !? for that. I don't know if it's proper English (though it is used a lot colloquially), but if it's good enough for chess players, it's good enough for me :)

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?

[Krach42]

Correction before I get bashed for this. You are aware that "The windows has been broken for 3 weeks." is passive.

Forget that stuff.

But just by adding more information doesn't necessarily make the passive more justified than without that information.

Re:Usefulness?

[PCM2]

The best grammar checkers available, as far as I am aware, are correct just about often enough to get a D in high school English class -- maybe a C

Spoken like someone who hasn't sat in on a high school English class in a while.

Re:Usefulness?

[amliebsch]

Then it is still helpful to communicate the ambiguity of X. THe ambiguity created by the passive form is even greater, i.e., the listener doesn't even know whether the subject is ambiguous or not. At least by using an ambiguous subject, you tell the listener that the subject is in fact ambiguous, which can be useful knowledge.

Re:Usefulness?

[cortana]

So Rumsfeld did know what he was talking about!

Re:Usefulness?

[norton_I]

I don't know about process documents, but most scientific journals long ago decided that being slaves to the passive voice is dumb. Typically we write journals in first person plural (i.e., say "we" even if there is a single author), and it is fine to use passive voice when that is the clearest way to write things. It really makes things easier to read.

Re:Usefulness?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that it isn't very useful. It tags just about every sentence sporting a contraction, and I have absolutely no idea how you're supposed to set any of it's features (assuming that this is possible) - like not flagging fragments etc. And it doesn't work on any locale other than US English. You'd think that the UK would be supported, but it isn't. Sigh. I actually *really* like the idea of a great FOSS grammar parser, but this doesn't seem to be it.

Re:Usefulness?

[theguyfromsaturn]

I personally find grammar checkers totally useless. But I know SEVERAL people for whom English is not their native language. A grammar checker is VERY useful for them. It allows them to make more intelligible sentences on their own. When they use it, it makes the life of people they rely on to make the final revisions A LOT easier.

So on the whole, I would say yes, a grammar checker is useful to have. It is the main thing that has prevented me "selling" OOo to a lot of the grad students at my university. Most of them come from abroad. It is a must have feature for them.

Re:Usefulness?

[gordo3000]

I take it you've never tried to type of paper filled with foreign words and/or foreign names? For me, that is the only time I use auto-complete but during those times, it is the most useful feature I have ever run across. I used to have to type the word without any of the accents the entire way through and then go back and do a 'find and replace'. Now I can type it once and it will always complete it that way.

Physics papers would be a real bitch if I didn't have that option(Schrodinger is a key example).

Re:Usefulness?

[omeomi]

"The unit was strapped in."

You've also ended a sentence with a preposition, which you're not supposed to do... ;-)

Re:Usefulness?

[bman08]

X is carrying is still passive. X carries is better. The PV also tends to get people really screwed up on tense. Plus it's gramatical crack. Once you start, every sentence seems wrong unless it's passively built.

Re:Usefulness?

[Deusy]

Most people do not know a group of writers, let alone a group of writers they trust.

This kind of feature is invaluable for Joe Schmoe who wants feedback on the quality of his grammer because he may not be a literary nor know literaries to whom he can refer his 'work'.

Figure out the target audience. Novelists are not the target audience. The average computer user is.

Also, don't call something bloatware and throw accusations of "massive amounts of RAM and processing power" requirements without first verifying your opinions, because in this case they are totally unfounded. AbiWord remains fast and relatively lightweight.

Re:Usefulness?

[WilliamSChips]

But if X is both ambiguous and unimportant, you're just communicating useless information.

Re:Usefulness?

[julesh]

You've also ended a sentence with a preposition, which you're not supposed to do... ;-)

In the words of Winston Churchill, "This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put."

Re:Usefulness?

[Hatta]

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.

Re:Usefulness?

[julesh]

But just by adding more information doesn't necessarily make the passive more justified than without that information.

True, but if you can add the extra information (identity of the actor) that is required to make the sentence active, then I find the sentence is usually better phrased in the active voice. Passive sentences beyond a certain level of complexity are frequently clumsy and difficult to read. It is often far easier to understand an active version of the same sentence. This is why so many stylists recommend using the active whenever possible -- you may be able to parse your passive sentences just fine, so you might not realise the difficulty they cause for your readers.

Re:Usefulness?

[julesh]

But if X is both ambiguous and unimportant, you're just communicating useless information.

True. But this situation is rare. Note that few people suggest *never* using the passive; that would be stupid. But many people use the passive in situations where it is inappropriate, where information about the agent of the actions being described is known, or where it would be useful for the reader to know that the agent is unknown. Passive sentences are also often confusing structurally, making documents harder to read. These arguments have convinced me that it is better to use the active wherever possible -- that is, in situations that are not as you describe, where the actor is unknown and unimportant.

Re:Usefulness?

[megabyte405]

Link Grammar was developed for English, and currently that is all that it supports. If someone would generate the necessary dictionary and rules files, however, under a compatible license, we'd (AbiWord, and probably Link-Grammar as well) love to have your contribution.

Re:Usefulness?

[VJ42]

I think that's got to be correct, as I have a vague memory of Word before the grammer checker underlining duplicate words in red, like the spell checker.

Re:Usefulness?

[An Onerous Coward]

"Software companies can do better than that."

Unfortunately, no, they can't. Natural language processing is one of those really, really hard things, like artificial intelligence, or trying to understand women. Just being able to parse a sentence into its components (noun phrases, verb phrases, adjectives, etc.) is error-prone. We cannot recognize excellent prose with current technology.

Re:Usefulness?

[stevejobsjr]

"X is carrying..." isn't passive. The agent (X) is the subject. Active voice is defined as any clause where the subject is the agent.

Re:Usefulness?

[thephotoman]

No, "is carrying" is the progressive. "Is carried" would be the passive. /anal-retentive grammar geek

Re:Usefulness?

[An Onerous Coward]

I have to disagree. Academic writing (at least as it's taught here at the University of Utah) seems designed to make academic prose as painfully boring as possible. My girlfriend's mother is a professor at the U, and one day she was so frustrated with the latest crop of term papers with their passive voices, gratuitous jargon, and interminable dryness, she asked her class, "Who taught you all to write like this?" The response? They were trying to follow the so-called "best practices" set out by the Writing Department. This, they said, was how they were told they needed to write when their audience was "the community of higher discourse."

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. Science isn't easy, but given some of the papers I've read, much of that pain is self-inflicted.

Re:Usefulness?

[i_finally_got_an_acc]

It's hilarious to see you talking about writing style with your comical misuse of commas and poor spelling.

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?

Re:Usefulness?

[Klivian]

Link Grammar was developed for English, and currently that is all that it supports.

A reasonable approach, but it may give reduced fitness for other languages. Limiting them to your design decisions, and the flexibility of your rules files. Depending upon how much height you have in the design for non English grammar. I'd guess we'll see the answers to that when someone try to add support for french and german. Having said that, MS have used lots of $ trying to do the same. And their solutions are from what the reports say, for the most part arenot particularly good either. love to have your contribution.

I am sad to admit that neither my linguistic skills in my native language or my math skills are up to the task. But if someone does, I'll try to help with testing and hopefully usefull bugreports.

Re:Usefulness?

[Thing 1]

Am I alone?

No, but neither are your requirements binary: you can have both, and in fact AbiWord is modular and thus supports your ideal.

Two big areas where spelling and grammar checkers can help are with non-native speakers, and management.

Seriously, the former just don't know the proper rules and tend to use shorter sentences which are easier for the grammar checker to understand and give proper feedback. And the latter ... well, the same applies, actually ;-) but also they tend to have so much more to do that communication, although it should receive the proper care and attention to detail that I believe it deserves, tends to be one of the first things to go. (Good management does not write long emails; they tend to write one-sentence emails. Subordinates need longer emails to defend/explain their decisions and suggestions, but management have "the power" to just make a decision, so they tend to communicate with fewer words.)

As to cruise control, I wouldn't seek out a car simply because it had it, but I would consider not purchasing a car if it lacked it. I don't use it every day, but when I do use it I really appreciate it. As another responder said, it sucks to be behind someone who floats between 50 and 70 MPH, randomly.

Cruise control helps make driving more deterministic, and similarly, grammar checking helps make communication more deterministic. What's not to like? ;-)

Re:Usefulness?

[Krach42]

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.

Re:Usefulness?

[Krach42]

Yeah, I'll agree that from the English perspective, the passive voice is uninteresting and unengaging. Because that is how native speakers percieve it. But there's nothing innate about the passive voice to ground this on. It's just social opinion, which is fine to base style rules upon.

I just prefer people to relate matters accurately rather than perpetuate silly reasons. (Those that lay people feel are logical grounded, but in fact fail to meet evidence. Like the sun orbits around the earth. (note from the perspective of the earth, the sun *does* go around the earth. It does not *orbit* the earth though, which is more meaningful, strict, and interesting.))

If it's something that is socially contructed and socially dictated, and has no innate evidence for it, then social dictate is fine. Like, "women are more beautiful than men." (people would no doubt attempt to prove this, but there exists remote tribes of people where men are considered more beautiful than women, and social roles are almost entirely swapped between the two genders. Given a counter-example, the statement is thus false.)

So, given any grammatical stylistic perscription that people can dictate, there exists a counter-example in at least another language that proves that such a perscription is not necessarily the only logical choice. Thus, perscription fails if it attempts to apply "logic" and "reason" on its rules, rather it should be based upon the etiquette of formal speech. "You do this this way, because that's how we use it in formal English speech." This applies across all perscriptionist rules, and actuall works. Of course, then you get those "rebels" that insist that they do stuff different. Well, you just tell them that it's not socially accepted formal speech, and they need to conform, or they will bring the wrath of non-compliance upon themselves.

Imagine a school clic that would identify itself as "linguistic non-conformists." That'd be funny.

Re:Usefulness?

[cgranade]

That rule is a holdover from Latin, and makes no sense when applied to English. It restricts what you can and cannot say in some very limiting fashions. Most works I've read on grammar seem to agree that this rule is no longer valid, and to end whatever sentances you want with prepositions.

Re:Usefulness?

[Pollardito]

But if X is both ambiguous and unimportant, you're just communicating useless information.

how about this then? "it doesn't matter who is carrying the food...you insensitive clod" i think that conveys even more meaning

Re:Usefulness?

[Haeleth]

Most works I've read on grammar seem to agree that this rule is no longer valid, and to end whatever sentances you want with prepositions.

Don't say "no longer valid": it gives the incorrect impression that there was a time when this so-called "rule" actually was valid. Which it never has been, any more than other made-up "rules" like the censure of split infinitives, or all that "that/which" BS, or the illogical hatred prescriptivists have for sentences starting with "and" or "but".

Re:Usefulness?

[Hatta]

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.

Re:Usefulness?

[dbIII]

Most people who use passive seem to believe that they need to in order to take the focus away from the person doing the action, and that this is particularly important in scientific publications etc.

Consider a technical report into the causes of a plane crash - most of the thing will be in the passive voice. Another less passive way to write it would be "plane go bugger up", which is perfect english grammar in some regions but is unlikely to convey what the author wants the reader to know.

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.

Re:Usefulness?

[moonbender]

X is carrying is still passive. X carries is better.

The first sentence isn't a passive construction. It's just progressive aspect.

Re:Usefulness?

[WilliamSChips]

But that emphasizes the unimportance, something you very rarely want to do. If you want to emphasize the fact that the food is being carried, just use the passive voice. ;)

Re:Usefulness?

[physicsphairy]

If you're using Linux simply use the keyboard switching option. I have mine setup so that pressing capslock switches to internation mode. Then I just enter Shr"odinger for Shrödinger or h^opital for hôpital etc. Another space prints the actual character, or you can just hit capslock again to go back to US keyboard mode.

Re:Usefulness?

[Mad Merlin]

...(like the "often used" cruise control on every car)...

Are you insane? Cruise control is by far one of the most useful features in a car. I don't want to be continuously checking my speed to ensure that I'm going the speed I want to, thus I set cruise control and don't worry about it.

Cars without cruise control drive me absolutely insane. The same goes for drivers that don't use it. They're easy to spot because they'll often drift between say 105 km/h and 120 km/h on the highway, and they probably don't even notice.

Re:Usefulness?

[slowbad]

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

At least build in capabilities to ignore quoted text and everything after a DoubleDash_Space_Linefeed SIG delimiter.

--
Transitive Property For Unnecessary Software:
IF version 7 is barely better than version 6
AND version 6 is barely better than version 5
THEN version 5 is vastly better than version 7

Re:Usefulness?

[thephotoman]

The answer is simple: no.

But hey, at least he tried to resign.

Re:Usefulness?

[jrockway]

> capitalise the "For" in "for(1..10){}"

Don't program in Word!

Re:Usefulness?

[Mortlath]

You can change your settings by:

1. Click on the "Tools" menu bar option. (alt-T)
2. Clicking "Options". (o)
3. Click on the "Spelling & Grammer" tab. (use arrows keys and tab to navigate)
4. Click on settings under the "Grammer" heading. (t)

One you're there, you can change all the grammer settings you want (like fragment checking).

You might want to experiement some of the more interesting grammer checking such as cliche and/or wordiness checking.

Re:Usefulness?

[Blakey Rat]

The killer feature MacOS has had forever is text-to-speech. Have the computer speak your text out loud, and the grammar errors stick out like sore thumbs... even if you're only casually listening. That's what I've always used for my writing.

Re:Usefulness?

[ignavus]

Okay then, translate "The window has been broken" into active voice.

"I broke the window". If anyone else had broken the window, you would have said so. Windows only break by themselves when you help them.

Re:Usefulness?

[Pete]

Krach42:

There's god damn nothing wrong with the Passive Voice except that it has a stigmatic notion in English.

Yeah... and there's god damn nothing wrong with murder except that it has a stigmatic notion in most civilised societies. *ahem* :-)

I prefer the active voice in writing for one simple and personal reason - too much passive voice gives me a headache and makes it difficult for me to concentrate. A sprinkling of passive voice is fine for variety, but a document written predominantly (or exclusively) in passive voice is a horrible thing to read.

In German, it has a air of respectability to it over the active voice.

It's interesting that you emphasise the "respectability" aspect of passive voice in German, as in my experience people (over-)use passive voice in English for exactly the same reason. They think it makes the writing seem more formal, more detached. More "respectable".

I find overuse of passive voice in English is a hint that the writer is insecure about their writing - especially in a supposedly "formal" document. So they overcompensate by going nuts with the passive voice. Or, as you describe with your dad below, they've just been taught to use passive voice for certain kinds of writing (with really weak justifications for that teaching - but hey, what employee is going to argue with their bosses' justifications?).

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.

For most types of writing, one of the goals is to make it easy for the reader to understand - to omit needless words. For "process" documents or legal documents, however, the goal is exactly the opposite - the goal is to cause the reader maximum pain and to obscure useful information (while making sure that information is still technically present).

Given the above, your dad's experience in writing everything in passive voice is perfectly reasonable. ;-)

Re:Usefulness?

[eobanb]

passive voice is disfavored Ahem..

Re:Usefulness?

[Lord Flipper]

the word finishing feature of openoffice.org, who's idea was that?

No shit. I thought it was just me, that "feature' is beyond annoying, they really ought to find out who popped that one in there, and ban them from the project for a decade or so.

Re:Usefulness?

[iangoldby]

"The unit was strapped in." Please make *that* into an active sentence.

Straps held the unit.

"The window has been broken for 3 weeks." *is* a passive sentence.

I know. That was my point.

Yes, I should know better than to keep banging on with an argument on Slashdot :-)

Re:Usefulness?

[iangoldby]

Correction before I get bashed for this. You are aware that "The windows has been broken for 3 weeks." is passive.

Oops. That will teach me to read the rest of the thread before replying. Apologies.

Re:Usefulness?

[Cyberax]

It depends, for example grammar checking for Russian language in Word is the best one in existance. No OSS product even come close.

Re:Usefulness?

[legirons]

Don't program in Word!

You've never heard of programming books, tutorials, or essays, I take it?

Tools should be versatile. A word processor which assumes you're writing a formal english letter, is not flexible.

Re:Usefulness?

[jrockway]

I've heard of all of those things but I've never heard of anyone doing them in Word ;)

Most of the books I read are written in TeX, LaTeX, or troff (sometimes perl's pod, too).

Re:Usefulness?

[Kjella]

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.

Double negatives is a PITA, at least on the multiple choice I have friday (we've been warned already, but the instructors can't change the standard). It's questions like "Can projects not be placed in the same group as investments?" True/False when it should have been "Can projects be placed in the same group as investments?" True/False. Particularly since it's an international training course where 2/3rds aren't native English speakers.

Re:Usefulness?

[miletus]

How about "Someone's breaking the window"?

Re:Usefulness?

[cloudmaster]

Never mind the fuel economy gain of letting the computer maintain a constant speed rather than the human thing where something distracts the driver, etc, and speed varies more.

Re:Usefulness?

[WilliamSChips]

That implies it's a person breaking the window.

Re:Usefulness?

[BrokenHalo]

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

On the other hand, some media (scientific journals in particular) insist on the passive voice.

In any case, though, there is no substitute for learning to use a language well enough to get one's message across effectively and without causing unintended offence.

I personally find grammar checkers (and sometimes spell checkers) frustrating and occasionally offensive because they usually attempt to cramp a literary style of writing into an emasculated and ultimately dull lowest common denominator.

It is easy to illustrate this: simply enter a few words of poetry of your choice into a word processor, and look for the grammar checker's response. Try this:

"Black he stood as night, and shook a dreadful dart." [Milton]

or...

"Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs, Upon the slimy sea." [Coleridge]

As a matter if interest: since those examples are off the top of my head, if anyone here is using a machine with this sort of software, I would be interested to see what the software makes of them.

Re:Usefulness?

[jonadab]

> Spoken like someone who hasn't sat in on a high school English
> class in a while.

Oh, come on, 1993 wasn't *that* long ago?

Was it?

Guys? Hey! I said, it wasn't that long ago, was it?

[crickets chirping]

*sigh*.

Re:Usefulness?

[jbengt]

Maybe it's useful if you're typing a novel, but it's terribly annoying at work, where I write technical reports and specifications. I get suggestions like (not necessarily verbatim):
"Shall" is considered archaic. You should use the more modern "will". - Well, in the context of specifications the word "shall" is considered a direction. "Will" could be considered a prediction, though, I suppose I could get away with using "will", it would be uncommon.
You've started the last three sentences with the words "The Contractor shall", consider rewording - No thanks, that's what
I meant to write.
Not to mention the usual abbreviations and conventions that get flagged as mistakes, and your "evil" passive voice.
By the way, passive voice is not evil at all, it is only bad when it is used where actor should be the focus insted of the acted-upon, which is not always.
In the end, it is clear communication that is important, contracturally important in the case of specs. The grammer checkers I have seen never have properly handled these kinds of documents

Re:Usefulness?

[aklix]

So is Google. You should google all the cases of it.

Re:Usefulness?

[megabyte405]

The Link-Grammar team is separate from the AbiWord team... Link-grammar is a university-sponsored research project that was licensed such that we were able could incorporate it into AbiWord 2.4. Their design decisions, not ours. :)

Bug reports are always welcome: http://bugzilla.abisource.com/

Re:Usefulness?

[amliebsch]

In Word 2003, the only change it suggests is decapitalizing the "Upon" in the second line.

Re:Usefulness?

[Krach42]

Murder is wrong for more than just social stigma. Instead let's take alcohol. The US has tried to ban that before because it's "wrong", and look where that went. It's because it's a social stigma that it's wrong, not because it's inherantly wrong itself.

Reading an entire document in the passive voice does not bother me. Yes, it bothers you, and it bothers many people, that's why you don't use it in English. That simple.

Anything people do to overcompensate for their feelings of inadequecy in writing is bad. Take the vast vocabulary that many people pull out when writing essays in high school and college. This one time, I corrected a girls paper, and she complained that I "took out all her big words." I pointed her to my paper, and said, "you used them wrong, and to point, look at my paper... see any of that crap going on here?"

The idea of process report documents is not to obscure the information. The idea of process report documents is to report what happened, not which employee did what. You said yourself, there are times when the passive voice is warranted. In a process report document, such a voice is necessary to the very core of the purpose of the document.

Re:Usefulness?

[Krach42]

"The unit was strapped in." Please make *that* into an active sentence.

Straps held the unit.

This doesn't indicate a change in state. It just indicates that the straps were holding the unit, not that as a matter of the process the unit became strapped in.

Good try though, thought I had you good with that one. ;)

And don't worry about the whole correction stuff... I should have read correctly the first time ;)

Re:Usefulness?

[Krach42]

Well, the real problem here is actually to native English speakers. Many languages have clear and accurate responses to negative questions. Let's take some examples, starting with English, then we'll touch Japanese, then German. All sentences given are grammatically/semantically correct responses for the respective language.

In English, the speaker agrees his "yes/no" response with his sentence. Thus, you use "no" only when you're responding with sentence in the negative.
Did you watch TV? No, I didn't watch TV.
Did you watch TV? Yes, I did watch TV.
Did you not watch TV? No, I didn't watch TV.
Did you not watch TV? Yes, I did watch TV.

In Japanese, the speaker's "hai/iie" response to the affirmation or negation of the question. This matches English for the positive, but is opposite for the negative.
terebi o mitta? iie, minakatta. (Did you watch TV? No, I didn't.)
terebi o mitta? hai, mitta. (Did you watch TV? Yes, I did.)
terebi o minakatta? hai, minakatta. (Did you not watch TV? Yes, I didn't.)
terebi o minakatta? iie, mitta. (Did you not watch TV? No, I did.)

In German, you have two pairs. For positive sentences you use "ja/nein" same as English, but for negative sentences, you have "ja/doch", responding on the affirmation of negation of the question.
Hast du ferngesehen? Nein, ich habe nicht. (Did you watch TV? No, I didn't.)
Hast du ferngesehen? Ja, ich habe. (Did you watch TV? Yes, I did.)
Hast du nicht ferngesehen? Ja, ich habe nicht. (Did you not watch TV? Yes, I didn't.)
Hast du nicht ferngesene? Doch, ich habe. (Did you not watch TV? Wrong, I did.)

This is generally why (at least this is the purpose behind it, even if it were not conciously the reaosn) the English-speaking militaries use a pair like "affirmative/negative" for responses. Because the response is consistent upon the question asked (a la natural Japanese).

Of course, English causes even more pitfalls with even positive questions: "Do you mind if I eat that?" "Yeah, go ahead." Since your response isn't a negative sentence, you say "yes" as per reasons above, even though we all know that "yeah" means, "I do mind if you eat that."

Anyways, the majority of people have problems with negative statements, even in their native language. Few languages actually have sufficiently consistent terms for responses to avoid this abiguity.

Re:Usefulness?

[Em Adespoton]

Coming in a little late, but your original sentence is too ambiguous to convert into a specific active sentence.

Which meaning did you intend?

The unit was strapped in. At the time of question, straps securely held the unit in place.
In the past, binding twine secured the unit.
I don't know why the unit is missing. Straps held it in place five minutes ago.
I know the entire unit was strapped in front of the mess hall, as an example to the rest of us.

It is sentences such as "The unit was strapped in" that obfuscate the concepts one usually tries to use to communicate to others via standard sentence structure.

Re:Usefulness?

[Krach42]

Since I've been taking the position of "in a process report document" passive is necessary, the context would be:

"After the unit was brought into the testing area, it was properly strapped in, and the tests were begun."

Fact is that any setence, active or not will lack this sort of context to know what exactly is intended by the sentence. But this context should help people to reach further into completing this little puzzle. (And you're right, I was missing enough context to make it solvable the first time.)

Re:Usefulness?

[agraupe]

Never thought of that, now that you mention it... very well, I'll use that to offset the fuel I waste by accelerating quickly and so on. It's a bit hypocritical of me to use that particular argument, as I do so many things that are detrimental to fuel economy.

Sure

[slashflood]

[...] integrated Grammar Checker. We can can do this because [...]

:-)

Re:Sure

[Surt]

They do it by dancing the can can, I don't understand your problem with this claim? I mean sure, you have to get the DDR keyboard mod to do your coding, but those aren't so expensive as to make this claim implausible.

Re:Sure

[thedcm]

LOL

Re:Sure

[Dominic Burns]

I bet you used MS Word to check it....

;)

Re:Sure

[Thing 1]

My keyboard takes PC100 you insensitive clod!

Re:Sure

[despisethesun]

Yes, the ironing is delicious.

LaTeX

[poopdeville]

What does LaTeX have to do with checking English grammar?

Re:LaTeX

[Cunk]

Nothing. Where does the article say that it does?

Re:LaTeX

[poopdeville]

From FTBlurb:

[Abiword] is the first Free Word Processor to offer an integrated Grammar Checker. We can can[sic] 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.

They say that as if LaTeX were relevant.

Re:LaTeX

[Fuzzle]

No, it's saying that they can provide grammar support because they can cooperate with link-grammar, and that the other two projects provide it with LaTeX math features. It's a very, very poorly worded phrase, but they aren't trying to create a link between LaTeX and grammar checking, but rather link-grammar to grammar checking, and gtkmathview and itex2mml to math equations. Poor phrasing kills the point though.

Re:LaTeX

[jonadab]

> What does LaTeX have to do with checking English grammar?

Latex is what you make the whip out of, that you use to convince your English professor that your paper's grammar must be okay, since the grammar checker didn't notice any problems. Without the latex whip, it may be difficult to convince the professor of this obvious fact.

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.

Re:LaTeX

[Seanasy]

Poor phrasing kills the point though.

If only they had some technology built into their word processor to help with this...

Pfft.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm laughing at all you AbiWord and OpenOffice users from my tower of Notepad!

Re:Pfft.

[Xamataca]

Luxury!! The old classic pencil and paper beats your ludicrous kind of electric typewriter...

Re:Pfft.

[An Onerous Coward]

You've just stumbled on the fastest way to end any vi/Emacs flamewar.

-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

[Directrix1]

GPL can use BSD code, but BSD code cannot use GPL code.

Re:-1 flamebait

[AkaXakA]

Exactly. The excerpt is such a pure flame it's rediculous.

Why can't we keep it a healthy, friendly competition? Having AbiWord, KOffice and OOo all competing with each other (and, to a lesser extent, with MS Office) is only good. The main reason OOo's grammar checking might be behind is the fact that Star Office already had one...!

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

[eludias]

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.

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=3 3 ]

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. ...and therefore:

[From: http://wl500g.info/showthread.php?t=3417 ]
There are no chance to build something useful from this sources.

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

[blechx]

It also allows people not to collaborate.

Re:-1 flamebait

[baadger]

So release your code under the 'public domain' and get it over with already?

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

[mikefe]

GPL can use BSD code, but BSD code cannot use GPL code.

Not true. When GPLed code is linked with BSD code, the entire compiled work is upgraded* to GPL.

There are repositories of GPL patches to the various BSDs.

* Some will argue whether GPL gives less freedom or more protection for freedom.

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.

Re:-1 flamebait

[Gnuosphere]

"Anonymous Coward" said:

"The GPL is very good at accelerating collaboration, except when you can't accept the terms of the GPL."

I do not understand, the choice of acceptance of the GPL is made when one installs the GPLed software. I am at a wit's end trying to imagine a situation where "you can't accept the terms of the GPL". As far as I am aware, there are no programs that abort if you click "I Agree" when a chance to "accept" is presented to you. Now I suppose you could write a proprietary software license that dictated that free software could not run side by side with this package...is this what you are saying? I'm sorry, could you expand upon what you mean?

"Relativism can be viewed..."

My understanding of "philosophy" is to avoid viewing a view. I don't have any clue as to what you mean regarding "converting Africans". I mean, I do - considering I live in Africa and see religious folk attempting to "convert" Africans (and anyone for that matter) to their religious identity or worship of some historical figure. But I don't understand the connection with that and -

"Don't frame restrictions as freedom because you think you're right and someone else is wrong.

I totally agree with this. Obviously one should not frame anything based upon what one thinks is right or wrong. One should only frame their conclusion around what evidence is presented before them whilst being wary of possibly tricking themselves with a potentially hidden bias that they are not seeing. Indeed, I may be biased but I am at a loss as to where my reason has failed me. Could you be more specific in regards to that please?

Evil is a possible result of a free choice and a necessary result of a restriction."

I don't agree with this and suggest that you may be biased toward "restriction". That is, you may have been restricted too much in the past and have not found the right kind of relationship with restriction. Perhaps you were raised religious - in an organized sense? I'm not sure if this is the case I'm just trying to read from what you told me about "converting Africans". I'm not personally for converting anyone to anything in particular. I'm simply a human being and nothing more in that regard.

Anyway, I don't agree with this because obviously there are situations where restriction is good and after reviewing the evidence I keep seeing that it is good in the case of the GPL.

Anyway, thanks for responding,

Peter.

Re:-1 flamebait

[superiority]

You seem to forget sir, that by writing code and releasing it, you are doing a service for other people. There is no reason they should be able to take your work and profit from it if you do not want them to. If they want to sell something, they can write their own code. Do you think it would be fair if I were to take a scan of one of Picasso's pieces, draw a moustache on a face, then sell it? 'Tis what I inferred from your comment.

Re:-1 flamebait

[Gnuosphere]

"Anonymous Coward" says:

"Is software truly free if you have to distribute any changes you make to it?"

I have never heard of any law that requires one "to distribute any changes you make to [free software]". This only happens in the proprietary and some of the open source worlds. That is, if you make software while under a traditional non-disclosure agreement, you are required by law to distribute that work to the company with whom you've signed a contract with (and with everyone else too if it is under a particular open source license).

Your entire argument was based on this supposed law that says if you have free software you must distribute it. This is not reality as far as I'm aware of. Could you please clarify so we can continue or please tell me where such a license exists?

"You" also say:

"BSD does not step on anyone else's freedom, it makes code truly free."

Yes it is truly free, but I do not agree that it does not step on anyone else's freedom. I agree if you mean directly, but the hidden costs are obviously there but impossible to quantify. You can't "measure" what harm it brings when you give people the opportunity to dominate others (i.e. proprietary software). And yes, the BSD is doesn't directly dominate but much of its resultant energy goes into dominative software. So the connection between the BSD and the strengthening of the harmful social effects of the proprietary world is obviously present but not measurable outside of anecdotal evidence. Now you can believe that the harm is not significant but that is where we would part ways. You can believe that proprietary software is a valid approach to the distribution of software. I don't agree. But I say that here is your conditioning that leads you to defend the proprietary model...

"The GPL is for zealots who think nobody should be able to code for profit."

The world does not owe you a living. I don't know where you get the assumption that the world owes you a paycheck for programming a computer. Money is being made producing and supporting free software and if you are not good enough to make enough to live on, then get a second job. Surely if you can program a computer you are clever enough to hold down a second job. Or do you really think that people who program computers are entitled to enormous silicon-valleyesque paychecks for writing code that ends up controlling and dominating everyone who agrees to install it? I don't know why you follow this mantra of "GPL zealots don't want programmers to make a profit" but look at the data. There are people making money from producing and supporting free software. In fact, the more the proprietary model is actually promoted - either directly or indirectly, the less the FOSS programmers can make. And unfortunately, the amount of huge money proprietary models make is not justified considering the harm proprietary software brings to society as compared to a free model. To justify the profits over the public is narrowly focused.

Thanks for your reply,

Peter Rock Lacroix

Re:-1 flamebait

[bluGill]

True, but it misses the point: if you want others to use your code, the GPL prevents that. The BSD license is intentionall compatible with proprietary software. I want my code to be used in many cases.

A grammar checker is a perfect example. If I write a good grammar checker (I'd be a poor person to do this considering my grammar) I want the world to use it (or at least the English speaking world...), to make the world a better place.

This cannot happen with the GPL license - Microsoft will not replace their grammar checker with mine, even though mine is better. If I had used the GPL there is a good chance Microsoft would replace their grammar checker with mine - thus improving the written English language. In the process Microsoft may fix a bug or two and submit a patch back. Even if they don't right away they will quickly discover that the cost of intigrating all their patches into my code without releasing them is much greater in the long run. Thus the BSD license provides nearly as much benefit as much as the GPL, yet allows more people to use it.

Now if this is purely YOUR code, you can choose the license. I can understand the wish to force the GPL on your code (even though I often disagree on the end results of that), and give you the right to do that.

Re:-1 flamebait

[bluGill]

My company doesn't want the hassle of distributing source code with our products. So we will never include a GPL grammar checker. (For our products this wouldn't make sense anyway, but for discussion lets assume that a grammar checker would be a useful addition to our products) Thus the GPL is something that my company cannot accept.

The question is what is your goal. If you want to make the world a better place by improving the grammar of written documents, you have only one choice for your grammar checker: the BSD license. If you want to improve free software only, than the GPL is the only choice. Take your pick: I would argue that the GPL is overly restrictive for the case of a grammar checker. (But I'm not a programmer on this project so I don't have any rights to set terms)

Note that you do not need to accept the terms of the GPL to run a GPL program. You only need to accept those terms if you distribute a GPL program. Thus click through licenses for GPL programs makes no sense. (Though I suspect the lawyers require it anyway)

Re:-1 flamebait

[Directrix1]

All I know is when I was writing some code for an Apache project, they would not let me use any GPL'd libraries because you can't have anything under the BSD license (and therefore the Apache license) that uses GPL'd libraries directly. Obviously, you could create a plugin API of sorts and skirt the issue a little. But you couldn't make the GPL'd library some kind of official component. Hence, my BSD code cannot use GPL code. I was saying GPL can use BSD, because of my awareness of the "upgrade" issue.

Re:-1 flamebait

[Directrix1]

GPL is forced collaboration. It discourages that which, in the general case, has not been an option to begin with, such as taking someone elses work and making it proprietary, but thats it.

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..."

Re:Grammar checker? No thanks

[EnronHaliburton2004]

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.

But out here in the real world, we don't often have the luxury of asking an English-inclined friend to doublecheck our work for us. If you had a job, and asked your coworkers to doublecheck your grammar on a simple document, you would probably get laughed at.

I often need to write a document quickly. I doublecheck afterwards, but common typos (it's vs. its, then vs. than, which vs. then) are easy to miss.

The computer helps me to do this work. That what a computer is supposed to do.

Re:Grammar checker? No thanks

[Al Dimond]

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).

Re:Grammar checker? No thanks

[AhtirTano]

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

What I find even better is to run my document through a text-to-speech program and listen to the grammar. Grammatical errors are much easier to catch by ear than by reading. It's too easy to skip plurals and verb inflection when you know what you should have written. But hearing it spoken makes that stuff obvious. Sometimes it helps catch long, awkward phrasings too.

Re:Grammar checker? No thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously you haven't tried to write in another language with LyX. Last time I tried to use it to write Greek I failed misserably.

But I would be unfair if I said that it is LyX's fault, because it isn't. There are serious problems with TeX and other variants like web2c or even omega. Now if you write only in English or a couple of other "latin" languages chances are that you will probably get away without bouncing into those problems. But to try to write in other languages, IMHO you have to really really know what you are doing. Or, you may start easily and then in the middle of you paper discover that for example you can't carry out a certain function and you have to find ugly workarounds.

Ac couple of years ago I decided to learn to use omega (which is basically a better version of TeX in terms of internationalization) and lamba (lambda is to omega what LaTeX is to TeX). The conclusion I reached is that one must make a tremendous investment of time to learn all these things while all his other friends will be happily writing away in their Wysiwyg editors and -guess what- their result may even be better. And that's because they have lots of fonts to choose from, they have spellcheckers to correct your typos, they have all kinds of nifty functions to help you get your work done. And all these while YOU are struggling to get a simple document to transform itself from tex to dvi to ps of pdf and for a reason beyond your comprehension some command bombs. And if you are one of those that will not quit easily, alas! You will be confronted with seriously incomplete documentation written by people that assume that you know just about everything on the subject and -hurray!- is itself in an obscure format that you have to convert to pdf to read.

Well sorry for the ranting, I just wanted to say that LyX (IMHO always) won't save you if you are going to have problems and I got carried away.

Re:Grammar checker? No thanks

[palinurus]

i too wrote a bunch of math papers using LyX (and later kLyx -- whatever happened to that?) when I was a student, which was, jesus, in the 90's. good to hear it's still in use, it's a great program. i should take a look at it again, i'm sure i'd be shocked at its quality if it's still been in active development for the last 5 years.

there is something to be said for word processing which doesn't create a lot of distraction in messing around with fine-grained layouts, but still produces beautifully rendered documents. you don't see this philosophy much now that every word processor is basically a word[perfect] clone. i'm not saying that fine-grained layout control is bad, but how much time is spent screwing around with fonts, margins, spacing, borders, 'keep with next/previous', etc in a typical word document?

Re:Grammar checker? No thanks

[Salvo]

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

Hey! I have an idea.

Why not send our documents to somewhere where they have a better grasp of English than in England, Labour is cheap, and they have huge problems with Unemployment. Grammar Parsing could be off-shored to India, and Tech Support Jobs could come home again. It's much easier to read Grammatically correct English text than Grammatically correct English Speech in an Indian Dialect.

Re:Grammar checker? No thanks

[earnest murderer]

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.

Asking someone to type LaTeX and claiming to include equation editing as a feature is not all that different than telling your users to format their document with HTML in a text editor and rebranding Firefox as your "word processor".

Scientific Word is the benchmark. If you want people to use your software in the math world you really need live equation editing. External editors (ala MathType) are too cumbersome for regular editing and LaTeX is too raw.

Re:Grammar checker? No thanks

[arodland]

using LyX (and later kLyx -- whatever happened to that?)

kLyx is long dead, but recent versions of LyX will use Qt instead of that awful XForms. Good enough for me. :)

Re:Grammar checker? No thanks

[gowen]

If you had a job, and asked your coworkers to doublecheck your grammar on a simple document, you would probably get laughed at.

Only if your co-workers are douches. At my job, when writing scientific papers, we're forever asking input on the best way to rephrase clumsy sentence construction...

Re:Grammar checker? No thanks

[jabuzz]

Scientific papers are not exactly simple documents are they.

Re:Grammar checker? No thanks

[cloudmaster]

LyX is awesome - I wrote just about every paper I did through college in Lyx - the ability to include proper math formulae and postscript images (which is just a LaTeX thing) with a nice, easy-to-use interface is great, and the separation of content from layout is amazingly handy. The Win32 port of LyX is pretty good now, too - for those stuck on that evil platform. :)

This just in

[Transcendent]

Microsoft Office beats AbiWord to a grammer check. More at 11.

...oh wait.

Re:This just in

[Gyorg_Lavode]

Unfortunately I have to agree. Nice step for Open Source but Microsoft Word is still my editor of choise. They just now are getting grammar? And their spell checkers are still luke warm, (spelled tomorrow tomarrow and Abiword couldn't come up with a suggestion). Microsoft office will fix a majority of things for me on the fly. And its usually right. For work, I would buy Office 03 on my own buck just to get the reviewer tracking features which make editing incredibly easier, particularly when having coworkers review it. I'm sorry but Microsoft Word is just the better product. Open source word processors, while usable, are just playing catch-up to Word and are years behind still.

Re:This just in

[XXIstCenturyBoy]

You say tomorow, I say tomarrow.

/French canadian here.

Re:This just in

[cortana]

Oh yeah?

Re:This just in

[scotch]

We get it. You like MS word.

Re:This just in

[amliebsch]

Wow, that font rendering looks like ass. No, worse, it looks like ass that fell off a truck into a pool of acid and was run over repeatedly by Soviet T-72 heavy tanks.

Re:This just in

[twistedcubic]

Put down the crack pipe dude.

Re:This just in

[Tough Love]

spelled tomorrow tomarrow and Abiword couldn't come up with a suggestion

Oh, tough one. a) Are you sure you have the spell checker installed? b) Are you sure you're telling the truth?

Actually Link Grammar checker is not GPL...

[pwagland]

From the Link Grammar website...

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.

Meaning that it is most likely no easier for abiword to include it than it is for openoffice to include it.

Re:Actually Link Grammar checker is not GPL...

[tritonic]

Agreed. It's strange that they tout Abiword's license as its selling point. I would say the much smaller memory and CPU usage is its major advantage over openoffice.

Re:Actually Link Grammar checker is not GPL...

[julesh]

I'm starting to find the pro-GPL tone of many developers very annoying, actually. Some of us don't license our code under the GPL because we don't agree with the philosophy of it -- this doesn't mean we want to have the "advantages" of the GPL rammed down our throats at every opportunity.

It's simple: a very large proportion of libraries are available either under the LGPL, or (like the one used by AbiWord here) a BSD-like license. Reusing code from projects that are not libraries is often hard work, and it is frequently easier to either find a library that does the job, or start from scratch. This means that for almost all purposes the supposed advantage of being able to reuse GPL code is actually useless.

Re:Actually Link Grammar checker is not GPL...

[Jorgensen]

Useless? As I read it, it is only useless to *you* because you don't agree with the philosophy - and hence not too keen on the GPL.
Tough.
If you feel that you get the advantages of the GPL "rammed down your throat" at every opportunity, isn't that because you're looking at a lot of GPL code?
If you want to re-use other people's code, you'll have to abide by their licenses anyway - winging about it won't help...

Re:Actually Link Grammar checker is not GPL...

[micheas]

From the Link Grammar website...

        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.

Meaning that it is most likely no easier for abiword to include it than it is for openoffice to include it.

That is true for forks of openoffice.org. However, Sun requires copyright assignment for all contributions to openoffice.org, (much like the Free Software Foundation used to, and still may.)

This is different than Linux where many people own the copyright. Linux has so many copyright holders that it is almost impossilbe to release it under a license other than the GPL. Sun makes sure that they are the only copyright holder on openoffice.org so that they can release the code as star office.

This means that If there was a lot of GPL code that could be quickly reused in openoffice.org it would be very vulnerable to being forked, with Sun having to decide if they want to roll in the changes of the fork and dropping StarOffice, or plod along and rewrite all GPL code that they don't own the copyright on.

Long term, I don't see how Sun can compete against Abiword and Kword without droping StarOffice.

Re:Actually Link Grammar checker is not GPL...

[julesh]

If you feel that you get the advantages of the GPL "rammed down your throat" at every opportunity, isn't that because you're looking at a lot of GPL code?

No, it's because every time I come to a forum like this and mention that I release software under a BSD-like license, I get GPL advocates telling me that it would be better for me to use the GPL.

If you want to re-use other people's code, you'll have to abide by their licenses anyway - winging about it won't help...

Well, yes. I just wish people would stop ranting and trolling about it. It's not that big a deal...

Re:Actually Link Grammar checker is not GPL...

[khanyisa]

Sun does require joint copyright assignment.

However this obviously does not apply to libraries used by OpenOffice.org, just the OpenOffice.org itself (otherwise they wouldn't be able to use Python, Mozilla, etc, etc)

So this is FUD :-)

Re:Actually Link Grammar checker is not GPL...

[micheas]

No, Python, is released under a license very similar to the BSD licenses, see http://www.python.org/doc/Copyright.html for details. and they use no mozilla code.

How to submit code to OpenOffice.org

We ask that all code submitted to OpenOffice.org be submitted via Issue Tracker . In your submission please list "Issue Type" as PATCH. Your code will be sent to the committer for the appropriate project.

     

1. Submit a filled-out copy of the Joint Copyright Assignment form (JCA); we have a PDF version you may print out. We explain our reasons for requiring the JCA in the Licensing FAQ. The FAQ further explain the use and advantages of using this license.

This means that you CANNOT submit someone else's GPL code.

You can however take Openoffice.org code and submit it to Kword or Abiword,

This is not FUD, it is a reality check that Openoffice.org does not have access to as much GPL code as projects that do not require Copyright assignment.
NeoOffice can add the the grammer checker that abiword uses because they do not require copyright assignment.

Sun and the Free Software Foundation like demanding copyright assignment, but they also get limited contributions from the community and seem to spend time complaining about it instead of realizing that many people don't like giving their work away for nothing. Kind of ironic since both organizations release software under the GPL.

Re:Actually Link Grammar checker is not GPL...

[khanyisa]

If you check out how OpenOffice.org is built, it includes a full mozilla build tree. This is not included in the OpenOffice.org CVS tree, but it is used as a library.

Maybe I didn't make my point clearly enough.

The point is that the Link Grammar checker is a library. It does not have to be included in OOo's code directly. All that is required is that the OOo code which uses that library, should be under a Joint Copyright Assignment for Sun's purposes, and that the license of the library should allow it being used by Sun.

If you want to query this, try asking on the lists.

Re:Actually Link Grammar checker is not GPL...

[micheas]

From the Mozilla Public License:http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/MPL-1.1.html

2.1. The Initial Developer Grant.

The Initial Developer hereby grants You a world-wide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license, subject to third party intellectual property claims:

     

1. under intellectual property rights (other than patent or trademark) Licensable by Initial Developer to use, reproduce, modify, display, perform, sublicense and distribute the Original Code (or portions thereof) with or without Modifications, and/or as part of a Larger Work; and
2. 
        
3. under Patents Claims infringed by the making, using or selling of Original Code, to make, have made, use, practice, sell, and offer for sale, and/or otherwise dispose of the Original Code (or portions thereof).
        
4. the licenses granted in this Section 2.1 (a) and (b) are effective on the date Initial Developer first distributes Original Code under the terms of this License.
5. 
        
6. Notwithstanding Section 2.1 (b) above, no patent license is granted: 1) for code that You delete from the Original Code; 2) separate from the Original Code; or 3) for infringements caused by: i) the modification of the Original Code or ii) the combination of the Original Code with other software or devices.

Which says that you can distribute mozilla under a non-free license as long as you don't change it. Hence, the complete unmodified mozilla source tree. The MPL is incompatible with the GPL so this is also how Epiphany, Skipstone, and Galeon use the gecko rendering engine. Even though Epiphany, Skipstone, Galeon, OpenOffice.org, and StarOffice all use Gecko.

You cannot use GPL libraries in non-GPL software. See TrollTechs QT library which is under the GPL or if you want to use it in something like StarOffice, available for a fee.

See the history of the readline library which is GPL and not LGPL. There has been at least one project that was GPLed so it could use readline.

Distributing a non-GPL program that requires a GPL library is a violation of copyright law, unless you obtain another distribution license from the copyright holder of the library. There is a reason the LGPL exists. and why companies like TrollTech and MySQL A.B don't use it.

Re:Actually Link Grammar checker is not GPL...

[khanyisa]

Wow this is fun having arguments :-)

Actually there are a few patches to Mozilla in OpenOffice.org. But Mozilla is tri-licensed and I'm not sure what Sun do with StarOffice under this.

But the whole point is that the Link Grammar license would allow it to be used by OpenOffice.org as a library anyway, so I'm not sure what you're getting at.

multiple languages

[marsperson]

One of the great things about open office writer is the possibility of installing as many spell checkers as you want, in any combination you want (unlike MS word, where if you're either stuck with combinations MS think should solve everybody's problems (english, french, spanish), or pay an arm and a leg for a third party add-on).

So, does anyone know what localizations of Abi will include a grammar check?

Re:multiple languages

[megabyte405]

At the moment, since we use the Link Grammar checker (see the link to the web site in the article), only English is supported. The program has been designed, however, so that additional grammar checkers could be added if suitable GPL or GPL-compatible programs were found.

How does Sun's license affect using LinkGrammer?

[sonamchauhan]

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

Re:Good for you but no thanks

[scrwvwls]

Can't say I prefer your brain.

Oh, wait a second...

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.

Re:Eh?

[julesh]

I'd be more concerned that if it were GPL'd that it couldn't use some or all of the above.

Anything that can be distributed as LGPL can also be distributed as GPL if required -- that's actually a requirement of the LGPL that is necessary to ensure that the LGPL is a GPL-compatible license (otherwise GPL programs couldn't use LGPL libs, which would be ridiculous). So there'd clearly be nothing to worry about.

Re:Eh?

[OpenServe]

I'd be more concerned that if it were GPL'd that it couldn't use some or all of the above.

You're thinking about it backwards, bringing up a common misconception. A GPL program can link to non-GPL (or even proprietary) libraries. There's no requirement that everything be GPL. The case you're thinking of is the other way around. In the case of a GPL library, only code under a GPL-compatible license can link to it. This, of course, can be a major impediment to Open Source developers using other licenses, and is the reason why most Open Source libraries are rightly LGPL. LGPL'ed code allows software of any license, even proprietary, to link to it. But LGPL is different than BSD because it still prevents proprietary forks of the linked code. LGPL is the "best of both worlds" Open Source license in many cases.

Oh, the hypocrisy...

[crazy blade]

...mod me flamebait, but I can't help myself. So, what's happening here is that:

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.

And what license is it that GNOME's distributed under?

Anyways, I don't get why the licensing issue was brought up, but let me state my congrats to the Abiword, GNOME and OpenOffice.org teams for their good work!

Re:Oh, the hypocrisy...

[Anthony Liguori]

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.

Re:Oh, the hypocrisy...

[crazy blade]

I was unaware of this. What you say is a good reason... but it turns out it has nothing to do with licensing!

Any project that employs this copyright transfer strategy would prevent people from contributing to it. Regardless of what license the project then releases its product under.

The poster suggests that the reason why Abiword can accept donations from all those GPL'ed projects is because Abiword itself is GPL'ed... I insist that he is trolling...

Re:Oh, the hypocrisy...

[uhoreg]

Sun requires you turn your copyright over to Sun.

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.

Re:Oh, the hypocrisy...

[Anthony Liguori]

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).

Which is why there has been the historic forks of Emacs and GCC. A lot of people don't like this. The FSF will accept a dual copyright assignment which is slightly better. They're reasoning is that owning the full copyright gives the FSF a better legal ground to defend Emacs/GCC against litigation.

Of course, Sun's reasoning is much less noble. Sun just wants to be able to sell it for $70 a pop without releasing source code--cute way of avoiding the copyleft properties of the GPL.

Re:Oh, the hypocrisy...

[julesh]

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.

No, they don't. See here for details of the procedure used in situations where copyright isn't being handed over, along with a list of modules that have been integrated into OpenOffice without copyright assignment. Basically, you have to tell Sun about it, so that their lawyers can check the module's license over to make sure it's acceptable for inclusion, and then they grab a copy of the source of the module and stick it in CVS. Simple enough.

Re:Oh, the hypocrisy...

[Anthony Liguori]

See here for details of the procedure used in situations where copyright isn't being handed over, along with a list of modules that have been integrated into OpenOffice without copyright assignment. Basically, you have to tell Sun about it, so that their lawyers can check the module's license over to make sure it's acceptable for inclusion, and then they grab a copy of the source of the module and stick it in CVS. Simple enough.

They are simply hosting libraries that are used by OpenOffice. They're stored in a different CVS module. You cannot submit a patch to the core OpenOffice code without turning over your copyright to Sun.

Re:Oh, the hypocrisy...

[sparkz]

BS. The reasons for forking Emacs and GCC were purely technical - nothing to do with licensing. Sun's reasoning is more practical - they are trying to avoid the mythical examples you cited above. So - hey - you've just argued for Sun's licensing model. Congratulations.

Re:Oh, the hypocrisy...

[sparkz]

Who has done the real donkey-work in getting accessibility into GNOME? ... Sun. All the boring but necessary work to turn GNOME from a hacker's paradise into a genuinely usable desktop, not just for the typical American geek, but for everyone across the world. There are a lot of people all over the world working on this, but Sun have a team dedicated to this particular aspect, making all the independantly-developed apps usable (not in a vague "yeah, it works" way, but by applying legal standards (I forget the details, look it up at sun.com) for accessibility. Not to mention that Sun bought StarOffice when it was pretty basic (remember 5.1?) and open-sourced the code, and then improved it dramatically. Abiword is okay as a WordPad upgrade, but OpenOffice.org has more power than AbiWord. I get the feeling that the FOSS world is about to repeat what the PC world went through in the 1980s - when Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, Microsoft and other players all battled it out claiming "check-marks" against each other, adding to the bloat of each piece of software, to no real benefit of the end-user. I hope not. In practice, I suppose the main thing for "market share" is to beat MS Office; for quality, MS Office is no guideline for a sane developer to take. However, that will take serious investment in working out what is actually *needed* by users. It's easier to take pointers from other software. I suspect that any "winner" will be the innovative one, in the end.

Re:Oh, the hypocrisy...

[xgamer04]

I'm a pretty good grammar checker, and seeing as how I've just placed version 1.4.3 of myself under the BSD license, I can integrate into OO perfectly!

Re:Oh, the hypocrisy...

[Anthony Liguori]

Who has done the real donkey-work in getting accessibility into GNOME? ... Sun. All the boring but necessary work to turn GNOME from a hacker's paradise into a genuinely usable desktop, not just for the typical American geek, but for everyone across the world.

There are two types of people involved in the Free Software community. People that care about Free Beer and people that care about Free Speech. OpenOffice is Free Beer. It's not Free Speech. To use copyright assignments to release code that people intend to be Free Software as non-Free Software is wrong, wrong, wrong.

If OpenOffice was BSD, fine, whatever, at least everyone has the right to turn around and release non-Free versions. However, since Sun feels like they're the only ones who should be allowed to do this, they decided to LGPL it to prevent IBM from releasing a closed version of OpenOffice (except it's okay for Sun to release it closed).

I appreciate their work on accessibility but remember, they did that because they ship Gnome as part of Solaris. They took a Free Software project, used it instead of implementing their own Desktop, and did a little bit of work on it to bring it up to their standards. They would have had to invest a lot more if they did it all from scratch. Sun has gotten as much from the Gnome project as the Gnome project has gotten from Sun.

Re:Oh, the hypocrisy...

[justins]

because frankly it's evil

A bit sheltered, are we? You probably thought it was a catastrophe on par with the holocaust when they cancelled Startrek: The Next Generation, am I right?

Re:Oh, the hypocrisy...

[julesh]

Well, that's true. However, nobody here was talking about patches to the code, they were talking about integrating existing functions from other systems (e.g. the LinkGrammar parser). This is exactly what is required in order for OpenOffice to do this, so to suggest that they can't because of Sun's licensing restrictions is clearly wrong.

But which will be first to...

[Eric Smith]

...have a GOOD grammar checker?

Re:But which will be first to...

[JabberWokky]

WordPerfect. Same goes for a good lightweight equation editor.

--

Evan

Re:But which will be first to...

[xwizbt]

I must agree with this. When I end a sentence with a preposition it's on purpose. When I accidentally typo an it's when I mean its, it's a mistake. I'd like those spotted. I would, however, prefer not to be bothered with a mystifying page of information on why 'that which I expected' should be something completely different, given that a line earlier the program failed to notice an egregious error about which I really should be notified.

Re:But which will be first to...

[julesh]

...have a GOOD grammar checker?

I've played around with the LinkGrammar parser that they've based it on before, and it's pretty good. I'd say it is capable of parsing a lot of sentences that MS Word's grammar checker gets hopelessly confused by. Unfortunately, it's quite slow, as it apparently has to search a tree that is exponential on the number of words in the sentence (I think). I certainly wouldn't expect to be able to use it for real-time highlighting like MS Word supports.

Re:But which will be first to...

[megabyte405]

Well, we do use it for that... Give it a shot! You're right, it does get a little slow on loading huge documents, but it's not too bad, especially (to my knowledge) considering it's the only useable GPL-compatible, free grammar checker available (at least when the plugin was written).

Re:But which will be first to...

[xgamer04]

I've played around with the LinkGrammar parser that they've based it on before, ...

Wow, slashdot could use one, too. No but seriously, I read this and thought "wait WTF, are they basing the grammar checker off of something else now?

Re:But which will be first to...

[wed128]

I actually like OOo's equation editor. If you don't worry about the stupid selection window and learn their markup, it's quite speedy. //I actually would like to get around to learning TeX one of these days...

Re:But which will be first to...

[JabberWokky]

I know TeX... I just laid out a book in it two weeks ago. I'd say the formula editor produces better results than WordPerfect's, especially for very complex formulas. My fiance, for instance, is a quantum chemist. She needs it. She also needs all sorts of funky software that I'll never need. For anything that a highschool level (and a chunk of undergrad) use, WordPerfect is fine -- and is/was better than Word's editor. IIRC, there was at least one plugin that was a more advanced formula editor as well.

On a completely different subject, I just called her up and asked her to punch an equation into KFormula. It took her a bit of time to figure out how it worked (she wanted to enter it all by keyboard, and KFormula seems to want you to click buttons and select sections before applying formatting), but she said it seemed fine.

--
Evan

Re:But which will be first to...

[julesh]

What's wrong with that sentence?

Constituent tree:

(S (NP I) (VP 've (VP played (PRT around) (PP with (NP (NP the LinkGrammar parser) (SBAR (WHNP that) (S (NP they) (VP 've (VP based (NP it) (PP on))))))) (PP before)))) [sorry for bad formatting, /. complained about using too much whitespace]

Looks fine to me, and to Link Grammar. The antecedent of "it" isn't clear, sure, but I think it should be fairly obvious from context that it should be "grammar checker" from the previous quoted sentence.

(Note in case you failed to understand because of a lack of information: Link Grammar is a sentence parser, not a grammar checker. The AbiWord developers have added a grammar checker that uses Link Grammar as its parser.)

Re:But which will be first to...

[xgamer04]

My brain just threw up a flag for the "it". Yeah, I'm niggling stupid issues.

GPL grammer checker is still possible

[Newtonian_p]

Even though GPL'd code can't be committed to OpenOffice.Org's main LGPL'd code base. Anyone can release a GPL only fork of the office suite with a built in GPL grammer checker.

LGPL code can be inserted into GPL code but not the other way around.

Re:GPL grammer checker is still possible

[julesh]

Even though GPL'd code can't be committed to OpenOffice.Org's main LGPL'd code base. Anyone can release a GPL only fork of the office suite with a built in GPL grammer checker.

True enough, but even that's not necessary, as the code referenced is distributed under a BSD-like license. The article submitter's on drugs or something.

Re:Good for you but no thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't want a grammar checker. Prefer my brain. Thanks.

Warning: Sentence fragment.

Having a choice is good

[IvyKing]

Since the OSS "office" programs are moving to a common file format (.odt), having a healthy competition between the various offerings may end helping all of them. The more people who have a reason to switch away from M$-Orifice to an ODT application, the better the "market" is for all ODT applications. I'd really like to see the word processor "market" evolve to where the text editor "market" has been for the last couple of decades where there is still real choice in editors (my fave being NEdit).

Perhaps the worst aspect of MS's monopoly is the lack of effective competition to spur real innovation and product improvement. Note, for example, the almost complete lack of improvement in Internet Exploder between the decline of Netscape and the rise of Firefox.

Equation Editing

[SCHecklerX]

I dunno about MathML, since I've never used it, but the equation editor that comes with OO.org models itself after what Word Perfect had back in the early 90's. Much much more efficient to type equations this way vs. markup or gui tools. For example:

x=sqrt((a+b)over(c+d))

would render as you expect (dunno how to show the result easily in slashdot, sorry). Very powerful stuff, especially if you are trying to type equations from notes and such...no need to take your fingers off the keyboard.

Re:Equation Editing

[Helios1182]

Very much LaTeX/TeX as well.

Re:Equation Editing

[piquadratCH]

For example:

x=sqrt((a+b)over(c+d))

would render as you expect (dunno how to show the result easily in slashdot, sorry).

This would look like this. Of course, you don't want to actually see those grouping brackets. That's why Math uses braces for grouping elements (x=sqrt{{a+b}over{c+d}}). Here's the result.

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.

Re:Equation Editing

[poopdeville]

Compare to LaTeX's:

x = \sqrt{\frac{a+b}{c+d}}

They seem comprable, but I like LaTeX's "functional" markup better. It might seem less intuitive at first glance, but it tends to make building nested structures, like

x = \sqrt[n]{\frac{1}{x + \sqrt[n]{\frac{1}{x + \sqrt{x}}}

(Solve for x.) really easy since it parallels the way functions are built in real life.

Re:Equation Editing

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

Are the plus signs really that big? The height of the sign is bigger than even the b. It ought to be the same size as (or even slightly smaller than) the a.

Re:Equation Editing

[Frogbert]

Much like MS Word is the defacto standard, and there is no reason to use anything else.

Re:Equation Editing

[piquadratCH]

Sorry, I forgot to mention that I just reinstalled Linux and haven't found any time yet to finetune it to my openoffice configuration.

After some adjustments (which are necessary because of my setup, not because of Openoffice.org), this is the result.

A Writer's Experiences

[ChaoticCoyote]

I'm a pro writer, so I live inside word processors. AbiWord is my tool of choice these daya on both Linux and Windows.

I turn off real-time grammar checking, because it distracts me from the act of writing. In my experience, grammar checkers are often incorrect in their analysis, particularly if you write fiction and technical works (as I do.) Unusual terminology and structure can give these checkers indigestion.

That isn't to say that I don't use grammar checkers. When I've completed a draft of an article, I often run the grammar checker manually to make certain I haven't missed anything obvious or silly. But I can't stand them in "real time", where I feel like I'm back in high school with the teacher looking over my shoulder and nit-picking every keystroke.

Re:A Writer's Experiences

[PCM2]

I turn off real-time grammar checking, because it distracts me from the act of writing.

True, true. Actually no -- speaking as a professional writer myself, I don't turn off grammar checking because most of my sentences pass with no difficulty. Typically when I see something with a wavy green underline, I stop and ask, "Really? Really really?" And then I think about it for a second -- which is good -- and then decide, "No, that's BS, this thing is totally braindead," and continue.

But that's just it, though, you and I are professional writers. I want to hear from Joe Business Manager. The bulk of the English that gets written is written by people with no recollection of any formal training in writing. I'm always curious whether automatic grammar checkers are any use to those kinds of people. I suspect that they are.

Re:A Writer's Experiences

[jonadab]

> Grammar checkers are often incorrect in their analysis,
> particularly if you write fiction and technical works

Yeah, fiction, or technical works, or formal research papers, or general-interest non-fiction, or, you know, pretty much anything else with more complicated grammar than Dick and Jane.

Re:A Writer's Experiences

[Just Some Guy]

I'm a pro writer, so I live inside word processors.

Out of curiosity, what makes you think the former implies the latter? I know plenty of writers that live inside text editors while eschewing word processors entirely.

Re:A Writer's Experiences

[Strolls]

...particularly if you write fiction and technical works (as I do.)

It looks like you're writing a Haynes manual. Would you like me to:

• specify the wrong torque-setting for the head nuts
• lie about the location of the alternator on post-1997 models
• just replace this entire section with "reassembly is the opposite of disassembly"?

Re:A Writer's Experiences

[russellh]

Joe Business Manager has his poetic license fee automatically taken out of his paycheck.

Re:A Writer's Experiences

[ChaoticCoyote]

me: I'm a pro writer, so I live inside word processors.

jsg: Out of curiosity, what makes you think the former implies the latter? I know plenty of writers that live inside text editors while eschewing word processors entirely.

If you insist on being nit-picky, then yes , you could divide word processors and text editors. In recent years the line between the two categories has blurred so much that the only real difference is WYSIWYG. I do a lot of work with TeX, code a fair amount, and write lots of plain-old-text files. The choice of tool depends on what you're delivering, and people who buy stuff from me tend to have a rather wide range of format requirements.

Re:A Writer's Experiences

[ChaoticCoyote]

pcm2: But that's just it, though, you and I are professional writers. I want to hear from Joe Business Manager.

I have yet to see any evidence that non-pro writers use spell checkers, much less grammar checkers. I just had a contract come in from a Big Name Company, and it's riddled with strange errors; I've received business and professional e-mails that make me cringe. My feeling is that many (most?) non-pros really don't care if their prose stinks. ;)

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:Grammar check is perhaps a misnomer

[Krach42]

Reduplication is actually a linguistic term. It refers to repeating a word (obviously). In English, it's hardly ever correct. But you could make the case for things like "he is very, very stupid."

Japanese tends to use reduplication for Onomatopoeias. Thus you get things like "giri giri", "nyan nyan", "don don", etc.

Some languages ues it for indicating the plural. A case can be made here for Japanese: "ware ware" (us) from "ware" (I) Note though that "ware" is uncommon, and for that matter "ware ware" is also. Either way, these words have fairly specific societal conditions on their use, so don't think these are a) the only words for I/me and we/us, or b) socially appropriate for you to use. If you don't speak Japanese well enough to know if they can be applied by you in a given situation, then don't use them.

More information on reduplication can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduplication

Abiword owns

[pardasaniman]

I just thought I'd drop my 2 cents and say that abiword is my favourite word processor.. It is so easy to use and fits in GNOME like a glove. OpenOffice really is a big mess code-wise. Abiword has much more volounteers than Openoffice. (OpenOffice devs are paid) I think in the long-run, Abiword (and Koffice) will be the office tools of choice because of the fact that they can move faster with their smaller code-base, as well as rely on other GPL tools more. Abiword is lightweight, and as a result keeps less prone the upgrade cycle. (YES, I'm referring to the linux upgrade cycle, the kind where applications continue to get bigger, and new computers are required.. It appears better than the windows one, but it is still an annoyance when I think that my 900Mhz computer has the same function which my 166mhz one used to. )

When will Abiword support OpenDocument?

[RoLi]

Is there a plan or rough schedule for OpenDocument support?

Re:When will Abiword support OpenDocument?

[Perl-Pusher]

All I could find was this

So I guess the answer is yes & no, Their are plans to support it with a plugin (like other plugin file filters word etc.), but no plans for making it the default. So it's really not clear if they will support it well or anytime soon.

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.

Yeah who cares

[gschwim]

I dont need no grammer checker at all. My grammer like myself is perfect.

Re:Yeah who cares

[02bunced]

My grammer like myself is perfect.

That should be:

My grammer, like myself, is perfect.

Re:Yeah who cares

[jZnat]

But your spelling isn't...

Re:How does Sun's license affect using LinkGrammer

[tpgp]

How does Sun's license affect using LinkGrammer?

You are of course perfectly free to make sonamchauhanoffice, incorporating code from openoffice.org and linkgrammar.

However, because Sun bases its proprietary StarOffice on openoffice, code where the copyright can't be assigned to sun for relicensing is unlikely to make it into their repository.

Yeah, but what about the crashes?

[ValourX]

AbiWord would be awesome -- moreso now that it has a grammar checker -- if it didn't crash almost every time I try to open or save a document, and sometimes just because it feels like crashing randomly. Then there's the fact that no distro has the latest AbiWord build in its package tree.

And to those who don't think a grammar checker is necessary: you don't do much writing, do you? Grammar checkers will not -- and never claimed to -- make anyone into a world-class writer. What they WILL do is catch typos that get by the spell checker. So for all those times that you type "on" instead of "one" or "to" instead of "too," the grammar checker will catch them. That is why it is valuable.

Re:Yeah, but what about the crashes?

[Red Alastor]

Then there's the fact that no distro has the latest AbiWord build in its package tree. What are you talking about ? I'm apt-getting it as I write (version 2.4.1) on Ubuntu 5.10

Re:Yeah, but what about the crashes?

[megabyte405]

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.

Re:Yeah, but what about the crashes?

[ValourX]

I'd like to, but Gentoo only has 2.2.10, FreeBSD had 2.0 last I checked (probably newer now, but I doubt it's newer than 2.2.x). On my laptop I have SUSE 10, and the latest version in the package repo is 2.2.9

Word processors and text editors are to me what operating systems are to sysadmins: I need something reliable. I love AbiWord's font rendering and I'd practically kill for even a mostly decent grammar checker, but it has never been very stable on my computers. Maybe 2.4 is totally different, but I won't know until it hits Portage or Ports.

Re:Yeah, but what about the crashes?

[megabyte405]

Hopefully it will arrive soon on your preferred OS distributions - Ubuntu (breezy/5.10) and Fedora-extras already have it. Enjoy!

Oh, and by the way, if it ever does crash, please let us know at http://bugzilla.abisource.com/

Thanks!

Re:Yeah, but what about the crashes?

[megabyte405]

Our Mac version is admittedly a little shakier than our Linux and Windows versions, but import/export should be ok. If you've found a reproducable crash, please let us know at http://bugzilla.abisource.com/ , preferably with a sample document, so that we can fix the problem you are having.

Thanks for trying AbiWord and helping us out!

Grammar check feature is not for everyone

[night_sky_nsci]

So, Mr. I'm-a-tech-savvy-/.er-with-perfect-grammar (err...), you hate how the grammar checker doesn't like your technical writing style. First of all, if you're that tech-savvy, turn that feature off or don't use Microsoft Word, brought to you the software maker you love to hate and troll for eternity. Like a previous commenter pointed out, WordPerfect Grammatik was pretty good at spotting errors at the right places.

In my opinion, grammar checker was never intended for checking your technical documents; rather, it is intended for every-day writing, documents that don't necessarily warrant the troubles of finding a person to proofread it for you, but still embarrassing nonetheless if a grammatical oversight happened to be present, e.g. a memo to your co-workers.

I hope people who whine and complain about how annoying the grammar checker can realize how lucky they are to possess such command of the English language (or any other languages in which the checker is available). Having immigrated to Canada 8 years ago with very little prior knowledge of English -- if at all -- I experienced first-hand how painful a 400-word mini-essay can become, and how embarrassing it is to get it back painted red with the unsparing wrath of the correction pen. Even the MS Word grammar checker helped me immensely to minimize these corrections, and while I sometimes still struggle with finding the right preposition to use, I can honestly say it played a significant role in my study in English: it is widely accepted that writing is the most difficult part to master in a language.

The news of a GPL'd word-processor to incorporate a grammar checker opens up a positive alternative for those who still struggle to compose the grammatically correct documents on the computer, and that's A Good Thing(tm). Many people can benefit from it, and if you don't like it, TURN IT OFF.

(Cue /. grammar zealots to find a grammar mistake here and mod me -1.)

Re:Grammar check feature is not for everyone

[MichaelSmith]

Cue /. grammar zealots to find a grammar mistake here and mod me -1.

Perhaps slashdot should install that grammar checker along with their long awaited spellchecker :)

I would recomand using tex4ht instead of itex2mml

[Lakedemon]

The advantages of tex4ht over itex2mml (or latex2html) etc are :

1) tex4ht can convert standard TeX/LateX/AmsTex/etc code when itex2mml use a dialect of LaTeX :

Using itex means you have to learn another (La)Tex API (for some commands at least)

2) tex4ht is a much more versatile, flexible and powerful utility :

Indeed, it allows conversion of
(La)TeX documents or formulas to Mathml/xhtml/html+gifs or jpgs or pngs/open office documents/pdf/a few other document types.

3) it is smarter because it lets the (La)Tex engine preprocess the document and it then uses the special dvi produced to make the conversion....whereas itex2mml tries to guess what the user want from the document WITHOUT letting (La)Tex process it.
Lol...it uses an (light) implementation of a "basic/castrated" Tex Engine

One consequence is that Tex4ht can generally use the macros defined by the user when itex2mml fails beautifully at it

If it works, it's not AI

[RAMMS EIN]

``In my experience, grammar checkers are often incorrect in their analysis''

And they probably always will be. Languages aren't purely rational, and this makes grammar checking an AI-hard problem. To fully judge whether the grammar of a sentence is correct, the checker would have to understand the sentence (at least partially). Even if you could get the checker to perfectly judge whether something is grammatical, there are always ungrammatical utterances you'll want to write.

Of course, it still helps to catch the common cases of people mixing up 'it\'s' and 'its', 'you\'re' and 'your', 'then' and 'than', etc. etc. On the other hand, there is a severe danger of overreliance on the software ("Computers don't make mistakes"). In the Netherlands, for example, compound words are written together, not separated by a space (so it's "footballcoach", not "football coach"). That is, until the spell checker in Microsoft Word started telling people that they had to separate them! Needless to say, this confused countless people, and it took a long time for the damage to get repaired.

Re:If it works, it's not AI

[PCM2]

Of course, it still helps to catch the common cases of people mixing up 'it\'s' and 'its', 'you\'re' and 'your', 'then' and 'than', etc. etc.

Heh. Common cases? Let's see... I wonder what you do for a living... puts(";-)");

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:Since AbiWord is Open Source...

[julesh]

Having played with the sentence parser that it seems to be based on, I think slashdot's servers would melt within seconds of installing it. It isn't exactly fast. Some sentences took 30 seconds or more to process on my P2-400 (so that's probably about 5 seconds on a decent spec machine -- still *way* too long for installing on a server).

Grammer Checker- New idea

[Free_Trial_Thinking]

Here's an idea for a grammar checker, I believe it would be a version of a Markov chain.

Take a huge corpus of grammatically correct text, use it to generate tables of what words follow each other. Then check the user's text against the tables. If your text isn't in there, then warn user that it may not be gramatical.

Discuss, discuss

P.S. Patent Pending ...

(ha ha just kidding, patents aren't for software, silly rabbit)

Re:Grammer Checker- New idea

[Dan Farina]

Been there, done that:
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 .html

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

Re:Grammer Checker- New idea

[brpr]

Take a huge corpus of grammatically correct text, use it to generate tables of what words follow each other. Then check the user's text against the tables. If your text isn't in there, then warn user that it may not be gramatical.

Finite state models of language just don't work because the grammars of natural languages aren't regular expressions (this has been known at least since Chomsky's early work). Moreover, even if natural language grammars were regular expressions, there'd still be an infinite number of grammatical sentences. "Octopuses eat toast on Ramadan" is a perfectly grammatical sentence but you won't find those sequences of words in any corpus.

Re:Grammer Checker- New idea

[Free_Trial_Thinking]

Good point, though an order 1 markov chain would work for your example. With a really large body of grammatically correct text we may well see:

Octopuses eat
eat toast
toast on
on Ramadan

An order 1 system like this would a least find noun verb agreement e.g. flagging "I be" or "has ate".

Perhaps my system could be combined with a traditional grammer checker? I guess I should know how the grammer checkers currently work.

Re:Grammer Checker- New idea

[brpr]

Sure, but if you just go by acceptable pairs of words you'll get gibberish like "I sat down the hole", where each pair of adjacent words is perfectly OK. And your system wouldn't get verb/noun agreement in many cases, e.g. "pictures of John were on display" would be marked incorrect because "John" doesn't agree with "were".

Re:How does Sun's license affect using LinkGrammer

[mikefe]

With the LGPL, Sun can take the OOo code and link it with any proprietary code they like. Taking out the SISSL dual license allows for this without the requirement of copyright sharing (which is what the JCL -- Joint Copyright License -- is supposed to do).

Re:This is a perfect example...

[megabyte405]

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.

We're proud of the fact that for most users, our LaTeX-like equation editor is actually more productive than Microsoft's.

Give it a shot before you flame.

Disclaimer: I'm the Win32 packager for AbiWord.

They should use use their own grammar checker

[toonrmeusa]

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

REduplicated?

[Anonymous Coward]

From the Department of Redundannt Brain Farts Department, no doubt. :-)

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).

I don't understand all the complaining

[Mistshadow2k4]

I don't mean to flame those who are saying a grammar checker bloats AbiWord or anything, but I downloaded the Windows version last night. It's 5.03 mb. So how much can the grammar checker be bloating it?

Re:I don't understand all the complaining

[megabyte405]

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.

Re:Two ways of looking at it

[uhoreg]

Uh, the article is talking about AbiWord's license making it possible for them to collaborate with external, separate projects such as link-grammar, gtkmathview, etc. It is saying that OpenOffice.Org's license requirements prevent it from collaborating with link-grammar, gtkmathview, etc. It is not talking about the lack of collaboration between AbiWord and OpenOffice.Org.

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.

Re:grammar checkers, bah!

[megabyte405]

As has been brought up by countless posters, though a "grammar checker" (really more of just a grammar parser) is by no means a replacement for proper proofreading, it does serve to pick up a variety of errors (word duplication, wrong word, etc) that a spell checker cannot, and therefore does serve a useful purpose for many users.

Re:grammar checkers, bah!

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

Spoken like a true zealot - defending the fact that your project doesn't have a feature by claiming that such a feature is stupid to begin with.

Grammar checkers are good for things like repeated words, missed or incorrect punctuation or capitalization, and other common mistakes.

AbiWord has a grammar checker. That's an advangate. Don't try to spin it as a non-feature because English doesn't have perfectly standardized grammar.

Re:grammar checkers, bah!

[mysticgoat]

Somebody is speaking like a true zealot, that's for sure!

I would like to see the spell checker in OpenOffice flag doubled words, just like the spell checker in my copy of MS Word 97 does. I believe that is on the wish list for OpenOffice. But I don't think that function belongs in a grammar checker: it works well as a spell check feature and would be available to those of us who would never run a grammar checker even if one were available. For me it isn't a critical feature, but I think it is low hanging fruit.

If you like grammar checkers, good for you. I used them for a few years when Word was new and Microsoft was our savior from the evils of Big Blue domination, and then I gave them up, about when MS transmogrified into the Evil Empire. In my experience, grammar checkers create more work than any value they add. If the paper is worth running through a grammar checker, then it needs to be taken through a review and revise cycle at least once, and that cycle is going to show up any grammatical deficiencies anyway.

If writing is an important part of the job, then rewriting is critical. Word processors make the review and revise cycle so easy-- there is really no excuse for not taking the time to do it. If there is something worth saying, then it is worth taking the time to think outside of the stale cliches. And if errors in grammar don't just pop out as sore spots while doing this kind of rewriting, then the solution is to take some classes in composition or technical writing or creative writing. Because anyone who can't see these kinds of goofs during the review and revise phase needs more guided experience in using english.

For the many for whom english is a second language-- try to get it right but don't fret over it so long as your message is as clear as you can make it. We are all learning to tolerate a greater variety of expression. But for the sake of the gods, don't think that you can rely on spell checkers and grammar checkers to make your writing better-- the spell checkers fail miserably on all of english's homonyms, and the grammar checkers are worse than that in a variety of ways.

I have a gnu spell checker; it came with my pea see.
It plane lee marks four my review miss steaks aye dew knot sea...

background processing

[cerelib]

I think the argument for bloat is that automatic grammar checking slows down the entire app, because stuff like that can. But if the AbiWord coders are at all intelligen, which I am sure they are, then they probably made it pretty easy to turn any feature like that off. So most of these criticizers just do not want to admit that in fact MS Office had a good feature first and this is AbiWord trying to catch up. Kind of the opposite of people criticizing Microsoft for implementing tabbed browsing in IE. Lesson, if MS had it first and an OSS app copies the functionality then they are just doing it to appease the people enslaved by Bill Gates at the cost of tainting their app. If an OSS app had it first and Microsoft copied the functionality then it is pure proof that Microsoft is incapable of innovating the way that the OSS world can. Pretty messed up double standard is you ask me, but thus is the /.

Re:How does Sun's license affect using LinkGrammer

[julesh]

You are of course perfectly free to make sonamchauhanoffice, incorporating code from openoffice.org and linkgrammar.

However, because Sun bases its proprietary StarOffice on openoffice, code where the copyright can't be assigned to sun for relicensing is unlikely to make it into their repository.

Huh? LinkGrammar is distributed under a BSD-like license. This means that Sun are legally allowed to use it, as long as they follow certain very simple restrictions (as they already do for other libraries that they depend on, e.g. libcurl). Copyright assignment has nothing to do with it; they certainly haven't had the copyright for libcurl, aspell, berkely DB, freetype, etc. assigned to them, and nor is there any reason they should.

See here for a list of components in OpenOffice that were not written by OO.o developers. There are more in StarOffice that couldn't be released to OO.o because Sun couldn't get permission from the copyright holders of those components to license them appropriately (e.g. the database system).

Go get a clue. The suggestion that AbiWord is able to do this because it is GPL is a blatant troll, and doesn't merit defending.

Re:AbiWord

[megabyte405]

Thanks for the compliment! However, since you posted AC on Slashdot, the chance of the mysterious "Format Paragraph" bug you mention getting fixed is even lower that if it were posted and modded up, and far, far lower than if you put it on our bugzilla :D. http://bugzilla.abisource.com/ - Please report any bugs you find so that we can fix them!

Thanks for using AbiWord!

Multiple spell checks already available

[megabyte405]

Of course, my comment didn't mention that AbiWord already has access to many spell checking dictionaries. On most Linux-like systems, AbiWord uses Enchant, which provides access to ASpell, HSpell, and other spell checking engines and dictionaries. On Mac, AbiWord connects to AppleSpell, providing access to all dictionaries included there. On Windows, a variety of dictionaries are available for download both in the initial installer as well as after installation from the AbiSource web site.

You need an interrobang

[VJ42]

Although IIRC !? is technically correct, people have tried to clear up this confusion with the introduction of a new punctuation mark into the english language: the interrobang

Re:Good for you but no thanks

[julesh]

Prefer my brain.

Warning: Sentence fragment.

Sorry, but that's a perfectly valid sentence. It might not mean what the OP wanted it to mean, but that doesn't change the fact that it's just fine. :)

Re:This is a perfect example...

[ninja_assault_kitten]

Thanks but, when I'm looking to travel back in time, I'll buy a Delorean.

Ehwww

[lastberserker]

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

Re:Ehwww

[hritcu]

Yup, this is very uggly.

Re:Usefulness? Same here.

[Doug Coulter]

As a published author myself, I have pretty much the same take on this. No grammar checker is good enough to be worth turning it on. Sadly, I've had the experience of having a book "edited" by some inexperienced person who thought that some grammar checker was god. Each change they made I had to justify changing back to something like what I'd written, and in many cases they had changed "true" to false, because they used the "tool" to avoid having to actually understand what had been written. Just try to get a good pun past one! They are just too simplistic at this time to be worth any serious condsideration by anyone who loves the language.

getting plugins?

[Bambi Dee]

I installed the autopackage, like it so far, but it crashes whenever I try to load an .odt or .sxw file. Something feels wrong about exporting OpenOffice documents to MS Word format just to re-open them in Abiword (I know I've imported OO docs in earlier versions, although some formatting was lost). Excuse me for being tired, lazy and a luser, but where/how do I get the import/export filter (or any other) plugins? Abisource just directs me to the main download page, which has nothing like these, and apt-get won't get me the current version.

Re:getting plugins?

[megabyte405]

What distribution do you use? The latest AbiWord is in Ubuntu 5.10, and should be hitting Debian Testing quite soon (within a day or two). These are ideal solutions. If you are not using one of these distros, please file a bug at http://bugzilla.abisource.com/ about the AutoPackage, and we'll see what we can do.

Re:getting plugins?

[Bambi Dee]

Thanks. I'm on (K)Ubuntu Hoary (5.04), but I suppose I'll upgrade eventually.

Re:getting plugins?

[megabyte405]

5.10 (Breezy) has AbiWord 2.4.1, so when you do upgrade, uninstall the AutoPackage and try getting it from apt-get. Thanks for using AbiWord!

Re:Cool!!

[Daengbo]

I'm desperately looking for the easiest way to enable it. I have Abiword 2.4.1 with all the plugins, but am mystified by how to turn the feature on...

Re:Cool!!

[megabyte405]

Stop by http://bugzilla.abisource.com/ and file a bug, making sure to tell us your distribution. Or, just pop by our IRC channel or user mailing list, and we'll do our best to help you out there.

useable?

[sparkz]

When is the spellchecker due?

Re:useable?

[megabyte405]

I'm afraid I don't understand your question. AbiWord has great support for spellchecking, using ASpell, HSpell, and other libraries on Linux through Enchant, AppleSpell on Mac, and our own spell-checker based on (I believe) Ispell with many dictionaries available on Windows.

The only thing a grammar checker is good for

[bersl2]

is showing me the readability score(s) of a document. Not that it's actually very useful, but like any other person with any other score, I like getting a high one.

What's up with internationalization?

[Sithgunner]

Abiword has been, for years being lacking the internationalization functions.
Otherwise, clean UI and cross platform is a very nice touch.

But whatever platform I try to test, typing Japanese simply is a mess on Abiword.
It's just not consistent with other Japanese input type programs and it acts weird when converting hiragana...

When they fix it, I can make it recommend for a very decent word processor to people around me.

To be fair...

[r6144]

By remembering the hotkeys, I can type in MS Equation editor with similar speed (C-r C-f a + b TAB c + d). Of course, there is nothing resembling user-defined LaTeX macros in MS Equation Editor (or OO Math, for that matter), so some complex symbols (such as bold x with tilde) are painful to type repeatedly, and reformatting all equations, e.g. resizing them or make matrices appear in bold-italic instead of a bold font, also entails clicking over every one of them.

Please mod parent up

[stefanPryor]

Parent provides a concice and important aspect of OpenOffice.org licencing. It seemed earlier in this thread people were somewhat unclear as to what the specific licencing burderns were, of if there in fact ever were any.

I am actually curious to know how people feel about writing open source code in this way. I suppose if you are releasing your code GPL then retaining the copyright is not necessarily important, although I guess it gives sun the ability release commercial versions of open office without being bound by the GPL as free software.

/. needs a grammar checker

[WebCowboy]

- Find common brain-farts such as reduplicated words.
[...]
- Point out incongruities and neologisms, which some people might not know aren't cultured english, such as excessive verbing of nouns.

Subtle but hilarious humour. In any case, spelling and grammar checking for /. posts might favourably reduce the number of off-topic grammar-Nazi posts that plague discussion threads. Thankfully such posts are somewhat on topic for THIS article, however it would be nice to have more discussion on the merits of new release of AbiWord vs OO Writer. IMHO the "GNOME" office applications (AbiWord and GNUmeric) are too often overlooked by the community even though they are quite impressive applications.

Grammar checking is a welcome feature, but there is one that I would love to see--solid suppport for writing and reading OpenDocument format. I haven't been keeping up with AbiWord development (the aging version I have suits me fine for how often I need it) but at that time AbiWord developers were quite non-committal. Since OpenDocument is now a proposed industry standard and not merely the format for a rival project I hope they've reconsidered their position.