[scribus] 1.3.5 Windows spelling checker ?

[jwminer at accessvt.com]

John B. wrote:
> There is certainly a spelling checker in InDesign 1.5. I don't know
> about Pagemaker 7, but there wasn't one in Pagemaker 6.5.  I assume

PageMaker 6.5 included a spell checker, as did PageMaker 5. I don't
remember as far back as PageMaker 4. PageMaker's spell checker is
available in the story editor, not in text boxes.

I agree that a spell checker should be available in Scribus. A
plugin is fine as long as it's well integrated and stable and a user
can add words to a personal dictionary and adjust hyphenation points
if desired.

These days, when I see an application that deals with words that
doesn't offer a spell checker, I think "anachronism." Hey--it's not
1990! It seems ridiculous to me to expect a user to jump through
hoops to check spelling after text has been placed in Scribus.

I agree about workflow and all that, but changes may be made after
text is placed and even if you're a great speller, you can still
make typos when you edit text and typos can evade your eyes. A spell
checker is very helpful even for good spellers. Of course, a spell
checker needs a human touch. But I sure don't want to send a
document to print without a final check to make sure something
didn't get by the fallible humans (including myself) who have worked
on it.

A bit of DTP history here:
When Ventura Publisher ruled the roost in the early PC days, it was
more an arranger of text and graphics files. If you edited text or
graphics, they were edited in the program that created them. I no
longer remember the details. Purists loved this. Other users did
not. So Ventura eventually changed this model and it was now
possible to both create and edit text right in Ventura. I'm not
familiar with Ventura after Ventura 8, but I recall that you could
do a fair amount of photo and graphic editing in it and if you
wanted to do more, you could start Corel PhotoPaint without leaving
Ventura and edit to your heart's content (using, I presume, OLE in
Windows).

I don't know at what point PageMaker added its story editor. I've
used PageMaker 4-something, 5, 6, 6.something, and I think I have PM
7 but don't recall using it. PageMaker's story editor was pretty
good. You could easily use it entirely for writing and editing and
spell checking straightforward text. For a lot of people it could
serve as their only word processor.

I've never used Quark and don't know how Quark deals with text
editing. I've used various versions of Serif PagePlus, which is an
excellent program that is in no way a kiddie DTP program. It can do
color seps and create PDFs and--by the way--includes a spell
checker. You could easily write the whole document in PagePlus.

The reason things went from the original Ventura Publisher paradigm
to pretty much all-in-one solutions was USER DEMAND! Yes, not the
desire to bloat up the program, but to respond to the requests and
complaints of users. "The Unix Way" appeals to, well, Unix geeks.
"Normal people" don't want to string together bunches of obscure
commands and eleventy-seven little programs if a single program can
do it all.

This also applies to book and booklet creation. Other DTP programs
(and word processors) usually include a booklet creation option.
It's pretty basic. This is another one that can be done fine with a
plugin that's well integrated and stable.

Another reminder: "bloat" as commonly used means "something that's
in the program that I don't care about." That's why one person's
bloat is another person's "at last they put it there" feature. So I
always get a little amused when people go off on how "bloated" this
or that program or Linux distro or operating system has become.

I think the question of what is a desirable workflow is not relevant
to the question of integrating a spell checker into Scribus. And no,
we don't want to go back to the old Ventura Publisher days. The
marketplace has already voted on that.
--Judy Miner
  USA

Registered Linux User #397786