Sigil Spell Checker Coming~ soon?

[user_none]

Originally Posted by cybmole

as & when Sigil does get an English spell checker, please remember who invented the language :-)

Don't forget I'm from the US South West. I'm waiting / expecting complaints about my choice of US English and Mexican Spanish dictionaries being included by default.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by user_none

Don't forget I'm from the US South West. I'm waiting / expecting complaints about my choice of US English and Mexican Spanish dictionaries being included by default.

Although pronunciation and vocabulary vary between countries, the Spanish spelling and grammar are pretty much the same anywhere, so a single Spanish dictionary should be enough

[meme]

Originally Posted by Jellby

It's probably related to manual typesetting, and the "rule" is that low punctuation (comma, period) go before high punctuation (quote marks). I don't know the exact reason for this rule, is it just aesthetic? something practical about the handling of lead types?

Originally Posted by Hitch

IMHO--and this really is complete opinion, no data--it's aesthetic. I think it looks better to the eye, a smoother...flow, or transition, for lack of a better word. I mean, compare these: (hey, if people can post questions about html and css utterly unrelated to Sigil, I can post typographic stufferooni, too.)

"...and I thought she said," he continued

"...and I thought she said", he continued.

To me, the eye continues more naturally, from the lower case letters in "said" to the comma, then to the quotation marks, in an upward-curve, than it does when the eye goes from the lower-case to the quotation marks to the comma, then on to the lower-case letters in "he."

BUT...that's just my $.02. I vaguely recall something from my student-journalism days (yes, we were still using quill pens then, ha!) about setting lead, but...I can't bring it to the grey-matter now.

Originally Posted by DaleDe

As I recall from English class a long time ago. The period and comma would look like they are separated by a space if you put them after the quote mark. There purpose would thus be lost on the reader as it would look like the period was just hanging out there in space. This is particularly true of typewriters that had monospaced fonts. The reasoning was related to business letter writing on a typewriter.

I guess whatever the reason it seems to be convention now. I lean towards thinking its something related to laying out physical type, but I've no real basis for that. I'd say for myself that the ", both looks better and is also more logical, even when using a mono-spaced font like below - it might depend on what you are used to though. But we're definitely drifting from Sigil here

"...and I thought she said," he continued.

"...and I thought she said", he continued.

[meme]

Originally Posted by Rand Brittain

But I'd also want to replace ‘ with “, replace “ with ‘ (this actually requires four steps where I first switch them both to different unused symbols before switching them to each other), replace ” with some symbol, then start replacing all the instances of ’ that don't need to remain as they are with ”. Once you're done, replace that last symbol with ’.

Even when this is done, you'll still have a few errors left, such as when somebody is transliteratin’ some sort o’ accent, which won't be right, so you'll need to manually check over the whole book—there's no avoiding it!

But being able to do those first ten steps or so with just a few clicks would make the process a lot faster.

A plugin interface might make it easier to do this, but I always wondered about having Sigil extend the history list of find/replaces into something like named replaces/macros. I don't know if this has already been discussed or not. This way if you wanted to remove all the paragraph breaks following lowercase words you could just click on or select the macro labelled Unsplit Sentences or whatever. Many of the find/replace commands need to be modified for specific texts (replacing page headers, etc) so they still need to be editable.

And it might be useful to be able to preview the results before confirming each change (sort of before/after on the left/right, or an easy undo) though if you needed to do a hundred of these you probably wouldn't do more than a few before confirming the rest. This is probably doable in the current Sigil - though at the moment its difficult to tell as the cursor jumps around the book/code view a bit confusingly - something I think that'll be fixed for the next version. Of course I haven't used Sigil extensively yet and only for some light cleanup so I still have a bit to learn about how to use it best.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by meme

A plugin interface might make it easier to do this, but I always wondered about having Sigil extend the history list of find/replaces into something like named replaces/macros. I don't know if this has already been discussed or not. This way if you wanted to remove all the paragraph breaks following lowercase words you could just click on or select the macro labelled Unsplit Sentences or whatever. Many of the find/replace commands need to be modified for specific texts (replacing page headers, etc) so they still need to be editable.

And it might be useful to be able to preview the results before confirming each change (sort of before/after on the left/right, or an easy undo) though if you needed to do a hundred of these you probably wouldn't do more than a few before confirming the rest. This is probably doable in the current Sigil - though at the moment its difficult to tell as the cursor jumps around the book/code view a bit confusingly - something I think that'll be fixed for the next version. Of course I haven't used Sigil extensively yet and only for some light cleanup so I still have a bit to learn about how to use it best.

I admit, I've always had a secret lust for a product that was a combination of NoteTab Pro and Sigil. To me, that would be the ultimate. NTP has a mind-blowing library of "clips" (macros and scripts) that are amazing, and you can, of course write your own. I (heart) me some NoteTab, as we say around here. ;-)

Just my $.02,

Hitch