Possible To-Do List for Future Sigil Releases Post Sigil 1.8

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by KevinH

And "bestseller" "automobile" and "airplane" are missing from the en_GB one.

So both dictionaries Sigil embeds are a bit out of date but the en_GB one seems a tad extreme

Hmmm... Yep, just tested those words in Sigil too and they worked for me.

Definitely looked like a British dictionary thing. (Which is why everyone should be using the superior American stuff!!! )

Side Note: "airplane" is marked as a level 2 variant in SCOWL's en_GB. This means "uncommon variant".

Originally Posted by KevinH

Please do send me your lists and I will incorporate the fixes.

Would probably be better to grab the latest "size 60" en_GB right from SCOWL. (As of today, it's 2020.12.07.)

* * *

Another good list to look at is LanguageTool's exception file:

• /en/hunspell/spelling.txt

These are usually user-submitted reports that aren't in hunspell's lists (at the time). BUT, big but, many of these are:

• Acronyms
• Company/Celebrity/Town names
• Specific/obscure technical terms
  
  • Computing ("stylesheet" or "endianness")
    
  • Biology ("zooxanthella")
    
  • Chemistry ("oxaloacetate")
    
• Legal/Latin terms
  
  • "ad nauseam" (to a sickening or excessive degree)
    
    • "nauseam" isn't an English word.
  • "ab ovo" (from the beginning)
    
    • "ovo" isn't an English word.
• Words from much rarer dictionaries.
  
  • Medical/Legal dictionaries.

Adding these, willy nilly, to a general spellcheck list is not the greatest idea.

This is why you have personal "Add to User Dictionary" or "Ignore All".

Side Note: And LanguageTool can be a little more lenient with their ignored red squigglies, because they're checking grammar. So they mostly don't want the spelling squigglies interfering with their grammarchecking squigglies!

Originally Posted by Ashjuk

Egyptologist

I looked in SCOWL.

size 50 (this means EXTREMELY common words)
- Egypt
- Egyptian
- Egyptology

size 70 (this means rarer than normal)
- Egyptologies

size 80 (this means incredibly rare)
- Egyptological
- Egyptologist

From Google n-grams of "Egyptology" vs. "Egyptologist" vs. "Egyptologies"...

I'd say Egyptologist can probably be moved down to 70 + Egyptologies can be moved to 80! (So this was probably an error.)

I'll submit a bug report.

Edit: Just submitted it. It's Issue #341.

Originally Posted by Ashjuk

bestseller

size 40
- bestseller

This word is so common it exists in every dictionary ever.

Definitely something is odd. I think KevinH nailed it, the en-GB included in Sigil is way out of whack.

Originally Posted by BetterRed

Outside the US/Canada 'bestseller' would more often be 'best-seller' or, IMO the better yet, 'best seller'.

• Google n-grams: "bestseller" vs. "best-seller" vs. "best seller" (British English)
• (American English)

Looks like "bestseller" became the most popular in:

• ~1975 British
• ~1996 American
  
  • "bestseller" and "best-seller" were used ~50/50, but the hyphen usage dropped dramatically.

All 3 variants seem to still be in popular usage, with "best seller" + "best-seller" now in the minority.

Originally Posted by BetterRed

Maybe what's needed is a universal English dictionary and exclusion lists that can be applied selectively depending on context. When I'm wearing my copy editors guise I'd prefer exclusion checking be separate from spell checking.

That's why there's variants for:

• US English for American spellings.
• GB English for British spellings.
• AU English for Australian terms/words.

Trying to smush that all into a single, monolithic English spellcheck list would cause way more errors.

Then you have another layer, grammarchecking, for things like multi-word or context-level corrections.

Like your example of "motor car" is valid, but a grammarchecker might ping it if set to US English... and tell you:

"Are you sure you meant this? This is a British term."

Similar with Indian English ("Hinglish")... there are so many words/terms/phrases that make absolutely no sense to normal English-speakers. Like this "famous" saying:

• "Do the needful"
  
  • Do what's needed.
    
  • Do what needs to be done.
    
  • Do what's required.
    

Originally Posted by Ashjuk

stylesheet ... (one you would expect to be included in any dictionary bundled with Sigil)

Ehhh, I'd still argue against this one.

Again, the red squiggly spellchecking is meant to check text in ebooks.

In almost all books, besides ones talking about HTML/CSS/XML, "stylesheet" isn't a valid word.

Originally Posted by KevinH

@Tex2002ans - Thanks for the links. I am aware of scowl and Kevin Atkinson's Aspell from my days at running the OpenOffice lingucomponent project and as my role as creator of MySpell and MyThes way back then. I understand the concept of a working set (corpus) of most commonly used words and the problems of a larger corpus hiding common mispellings.

* * *

Anyway, Ashjuk, I'd also be interested in seeing this 2000 word list. You may have caught some words that could definitely use tweaking.

And if we get them tweaked directly in the source lists, that would benefit everyone who relies on these lists (which includes LibreOffice, Firefox, and of course, the great Sigil ).

[Ashjuk]

Wow! It seems I have opened Pandora's Box with this one.

@ Kevin - I will get around to sending you my list ASAP. I need to go through it and extract the definite UK specific words, and there are a few names and places that got in there early on. I now have two separate user dictionaries for those.

@ BetterRed I have to disagree with you on airplane/aeroplane one as one who lives in the UK close to a major airport everyone I know uses airplane in common speech.

@ Tex2002ans - I will upload the text files to my Google drive account and post the link here for everyone to take a look at. As for 'Egyptologist', I think you will find that this is not as rare as SCOWL suggests. A Internet search brings up numerous links to its usage - there are even academists who refer to themselves as Egyptologists.

[Uncle Robin]

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

Similar with Indian English ("Hinglish")... there are so many words/terms/phrases that make absolutely no sense to normal English-speakers. Like this "famous" saying:

• "Do the needful"
  
  • Do what's needed.
    
  • Do what needs to be done.
    
  • Do what's required.
    

Indian English is not Hinglish. Hinglish is, as it's name suggests, a hybrid of Hindi and English. "Do the needful" made perfect sense to "normal English speakers" a century ago, it's one of many expressions from the Wodehouse type era that persist in Indian English. And as someone raised (outside of India) by a parent for whom Indian English was their L1, I heard this expression plenty of times and used it often myself. Your comment that it "makes no sense to normal English speakers" is patronising and offensive, belittling the hundreds of millions of people who use Indian English as their L2 and often as a de facto L1.

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by Ashjuk

@ Tex2002ans - I will upload the text files to my Google drive account and post the link here for everyone to take a look at.

Originally Posted by Ashjuk

As for 'Egyptologist', I think you will find that this is not as rare as SCOWL suggests.

Yes, hence the bug report.

"Egyptologist" + "Egyptologists" belong in the "_large" (size 70) dictionaries.

Egyptologies is near non-existent. It's a complete speck. (I've never seen such a rare word on Google n-grams. Its usage goes down to the final, 10th decimal place.)

Right now, those words are mistakenly placed.

Originally Posted by Ashjuk

@ BetterRed I have to disagree with you on airplane/aeroplane one as one who lives in the UK close to a major airport everyone I know uses airplane in common speech.

Google n-grams: "airplane" vs. "aeroplane"
- American
- British

You can see in American, "aeroplane" pretty much doesn't exist since 1930.

In British, it's only recently (2012) that "airplane" barely squeezed by "aeroplane".

If you look at dictionaries though, they all have "regional notes":

• Collins
  
  • An aeroplane is a vehicle with wings and one or more engines that enable it to fly through the air.
    
  • British. Regional Note: in AM, use airplane.
• Lexico
  
  • British - A powered flying vehicle with fixed wings and a weight greater than that of the air it displaces.
    
  • North American term airplane.
• Merriam-Webster
  
  • British - Airplane.
• Macmillan
  
  • British / UK - a plane.
• American Heritage
  
  • Chiefly British. Variant of airplane.

Dictionaries are slower moving, but they are very authoritative sources. You'd have to give a lot of solid proof to overturn information in them.

Perhaps in a few more years, if that "airplane" trend continues, then it will become a more accepted/common British variant (in the dictionaries).

- - -

Side Note: A few months back, I ran across this great podcast, "Pessimists Aloud". They dig up old newspaper articles and read them in an old-timey voice.

You may like these 2 episodes:

• “A Skeptical Nation Visits Upon the Airplane the Doubts it Once Felt for the Automobile" - The New York Times (1928)
  
  • Detailed article here: "1920s Reactions to Aeroplanes"
• Reading in Bed (1909) + Aeroplane Face (1908)
  

Maybe that's why American's stopped spelling it "aeroplane"—they didn't want to get "Aeroplane Face" (or "Bicycle Face")!

That dang modern technology, making the wind blow against your face so fast your face gets permanently distorted!

[rkomar]

Heh! I remember in the 1980's a joke going around that the word "automobile" was an abomination because it was a mixture of Greek "auto" with Latin "mobile". The more consistent versions would be "autokineticon" or "ipsomobile". Fix the dictionaries!

[KevinH]

FYI,

Just added to master ... when you are editing a CSS stylesheet in CodeView, you can now select a class name (including leading .) and use a Right Click to rename that class in that stylesheet. This will in turn fix it up everyplace in that sheet and in all impacted xhtml files using multiple threads for speed.

Note: This is only available when editing a CSS stylesheet in CodeView. If you are editing an xhtml file in CodeView and want to rename a class you see there, you can use the existing GoToLinkOrStyle to get you where you need to be easily.

This approach was chosen because it prevents class name collisions with style tag contents in head in xhtml files. Those style tags in head really should first be made into external stylesheets if you want to have access to them via this feature.

There is now a plugin from Doitsu that can do that for you.

More CSS Stylesheet based tools will be coming in future releases of Sigil.

[Uncle Robin]

Originally Posted by rkomar

Heh! I remember in the 1980's a joke going around that the word "automobile" was an abomination because it was a mixture of Greek "auto" with Latin "mobile". The more consistent versions would be "autokineticon" or "ipsomobile". Fix the dictionaries!

Ditto television.

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by KevinH

Just added to master ... when you are editing a CSS stylesheet in CodeView, you can now select a class name (including leading .) and use a Right Click to rename that class in that stylesheet. This will in turn fix it up everyplace in that sheet and in all impacted xhtml files using multiple threads for speed.

Fantastic!

That will help so much when cleaning up those pesky InDesign files.

I'm always jumping to the CSS class, trying to figure out exactly what the heck the class was meant to be doing... only to find out it's a bunch of junk + a transparent/white background.

Now it'll be a simple: Right-Click -> Rename -> GONE.

[democrite]

Indeed thanks very much. I have one with a few dozen chapters, each with separate .css, each with same named styles defined differently. Cleaning up and merging now a bit easier.

[democrite]

KevinH,


In curent master, might there be some cases when the title indicator of in Sigil norm isn't shown and detected? I haven't yet tried to reproduce. At least moments ago after normalizing, such didn't display until epub close and reopen.

[KevinH]

The [std] indicator is updated after every File/Resource addition, deletion, or move so it catches every standardize test I tried.

Thinking about it more now, that does leave out rename, but the only two names that mean anything to standardization are the opf name and the ncx name (if it exists). So could the only things that were not standard in bug test case be "content.opf" or "toc.ncx" before you standardized it?

If so, let me know and I will see if there are signals for renaming both that I can hook to somehow to detect when to update the Window title bar.

KevinH

Originally Posted by democrite

KevinH,


In curent master, might there be some cases when the title indicator of in Sigil norm isn't shown and detected? I haven't yet tried to reproduce. At least moments ago after normalizing, such didn't display until epub close and reopen.

[democrite]

This one in particular was similar to standard format except folder was named OPS. Thus:

OPS/Images
OPS/Styles/
OPS/Text/
OPS/content.opf
OPS/toc.ncx

There is also originally "META-INF/com.apple.ibooks.display-options.xml"

Tested a few others w/o issue.

[DiapDealer]

That's not a "normaiized" epub, then. There'd be no reason for the title bar to indicate it was.

[democrite]

As said,

Originally Posted by democrite

after normalizing, such didn't display until epub close and reopen.

😀

[KevinH]

Then some signals are broken on Qt 6 or macOS. Your example requires lots of Moves to standardize it so that should trigger the setWindowTitle update properly.